Video-based event recognition: activity representation and probabilistic recognition methods

We present a new representation and recognition method for human activities. An activity is considered to be composed of action threads, each thread being executed by a single actor. A single-thread action is represented by a stochastic finite automaton of event states, which are recognized from the characteristics of the trajectory and shape of moving blob of the actor using Bayesian methods. A multi-agent event is composed of several action threads related by temporal constraints. Multi-agent events are recognized by propagating the constraints and likelihood of event threads in a temporal logic network. We present results on real-world data and performance characterization on perturbed data. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.