Convolutional Relational Machine for Group Activity Recognition
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Convolutional Relational Machine for Group Activity Recognition Sina Mokhtarzadeh Azar1∗, Mina Ghadimi Atigh1∗, Ahmad Nickabadi1, Alexandre Alahi2 1 Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT), SML lab 424 Hafez Ave, Tehran, Iran {sinamokhtarzadeh,minaghadimi}@aut.ac.ir 2 Ecole´ Polytechnique Fed´ erale´ de Lausanne (EPFL), VITA lab CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Abstract Activity Map Individual Activity Map Group Activity Map We present an end-to-end deep Convolutional Neural Network called Convolutional Relational Machine (CRM) for recognizing group activities that utilizes the information in spatial relations between individual persons in image or video. It learns to produce an intermediate spatial repre- sentation (activity map) based on individual and group ac- tivities. A multi-stage refinement component is responsible for decreasing the incorrect predictions in the activity map. Right Spike Finally, an aggregation component uses the refined infor- mation to recognize group activities. Experimental results Figure 1. Group activity recognition using the proposed spatial demonstrate the constructive contribution of the informa- representation (activity map). Our model learns to encode spatial tion extracted and represented in the form of the activity relations in the form of the activity map and uses it to recognize the group activity (“Right Spike” in this example). Different indi- map. CRM shows advantages over state-of-the-art models vidual and group activity fields are shown with different colors. on Volleyball and Collective Activity datasets. mation between consecutive frames of a video also plays an 1. Introduction important role in understanding complex activities. Another Human activities can be categorized into two types: ei- recently explored source of information in reasoning over ther individual actions involving a single person e.g., Run- group activities is the relationships between individuals in ning/Jumping, or group activities involving multiple hu- a scene. Some of the existing approaches use various pool- mans e.g., Talking/Queuing. Recognizing group activity re- ing strategies to extract a part of relational cues [2, 20, 13]. quires understanding individual actions as well as the joint In [12], a more complex approach is used to extract rela- modeling of the group of individuals. It is important in ap- tional information from the neighbouring individuals. Yet, plications like sports video analysis, surveillance, and even existing methods are not fully exploiting all the available social robots that need to operate in a socially-aware manner information to model spatial relationships between persons. around humans (e.g., not crossing two individuals talking to One may expect a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to each other). In this work, we propose to classify the group extract these relations. Our experiments show that it is very activity given single or few consecutive images of a scene. difficult for a CNN to learn high-level relationships. Hence, We do not explicitly detect nor track any individual. we introduce a mechanism to jointly consider the relation- ships between individuals. There are multiple sources of information that can be helpful in recognizing activities. One source is the appear- In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Neural Net- ance features of individuals. Many activities are recogniz- work model for group activity recognition, referred to as able by knowing how the persons look like. Temporal infor- Convolutional Relational Machine (CRM), where we intro- duce an intermediate activity-based representation – an ac- ∗Equal contribution tivity map– as a means of extracting the spatial relations be- 7892 tween activities of persons. Along with this representation Considering the recent success of deep neural networks scheme, we train our architecture with a multi-stage method in the field of computer vision, various works studied the similar to [27]. Our method generates an initial activity map group activity recognition using deep learning. Deng et from the input image or video and then refines it through al. [7] produces unary potentials using CNN classifiers and few steps. The refined activity map is combined with the develops a neural network that performs message passing image or video features and a final aggregation module is to refine the initial predictions. In [6], message passing is responsible for classifying the group activity (see Figure 1). performed in a graph with the person and group nodes by a Our experiments show that we outperform previous works Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The connections of this on two publicly available datasets. graph are controlled by some gating functions. 2. Related Works Many of the recent deep learning based works on group activity recognition utilize the power of RNN to model First, we present an overview of the works in action the activity recognition considering the temporal domain recognition. Then, some of the key works on group activity [13, 20, 24, 26, 21, 2, 16, 12]. The idea of using RNNs for recognition are reviewed. group activity recognition started with [13] that uses Long 2.1. Action Recognition Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to model individual persons and pools the representations from them to a spe- Many of the recent works in action recognition utilize a cific LSTM for modeling group activity. In [20], attention two-stream CNN model with input RGB and handcrafted pooling is utilized to give higher importance to key actors. optical flow features extracted from consecutive frames of a Person-centered features are introduced in [24] as input to a video [22, 9, 25, 3]. The two-stream approach was first used hierarchical LSTM. Wang et al. [26] introduce a three-level in [22] by training a CNN on the single RGB frame to ex- model based on person, group and scene representations. tract the appearance cues and another CNN on stacked opti- An LSTM models every person similar to previous mod- cal flow fields to consider the temporal information. These els. The output representations of these LSTMS are spatio- streams are combined using simple fusion methods. Feicht- temporally grouped and processed to form the group rep- enhofer et al. [9] study more complex fusion strategies for resentations which are then used to make scene-level pre- combining the two streams. In [25], Temporal Segment dictions. In [21], a new energy layer is used instead of the Network is proposed to model long-range temporal cues softmax layer which also considers the p-values of predic- by dividing the video into segments and applying a multi- tions. Bagautdinov et al. [2] introduce an end-to-end frame- stream model on the snippets sampled from these segments. work for joint detection, individual action classification and In a different approach, [3] converts existing 2D CNNs to group activity recognition. In a different work, authors in the ones with 3D filters to be able to process multiple RGB [16] develop a model that recognizes group activity based frames together. Interestingly, they still find it useful to ap- on the semantic information in the form of automatically ply their model to multiple optical flow fields and fuse the generated captions. Most recently, Ibrahim et al. [12] pro- results with the RGB stream. Some other works use recur- pose a hierarchical relational network to produce represen- rent approaches to model the actions in video [8, 18, 19, 17] tations based on the relations of persons. Our work has a or even a single CNN [11]. Donahue et al. [8] propose the similar goal to [12]. Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks model that combines the CNN features from multiple frames using an LSTM to recognize actions. In another work [17], VideoL- STM is developed for action classification and localization. 3. Proposed Model A spatial attention mechanism is used in this model which utilizes the motion information from optical flow fields be- The goal of our approach is to improve the group activ- tween frames. ity recognition performance by introducing an intermediate activity-based representation that we call activity map as a 2.2. Group Activity Recognition means of extracting the spatial relations between activities Initial approaches for group activity recognition were of persons. Along with this representation scheme, a multi- based on probabilistic graphical models. [15] models the stage neural network model is proposed for generating an person-person and person-group relations in a graphical initial activity map from the input image or video and then model. The optimal graph connectivity and the best set of refining it in consequent steps. The final activity map is individual actions and group activity labels are inferred in used to conduct the higher level reasoning for predicting this approach. A joint probabilistic framework is proposed the group activity. In the following subsection, we first re- in [4] for tracking individuals and inferring their group ac- view the overall outline of the model and then discuss the tivity. important components of the model in more details. 7893 AG AI Input K × H × W × C A p CNN L L L (2D or 3D) A1 A2 AT LG Feature Map ′ ′ ^ ^ ^ ^ H ×W × D ϕ A1 ψ1 A2 ψT−1 AT ζ p Figure 2. Overview of our proposed model. Input image or video is processed by a 2D or 3D CNN to produce the preliminary feature ˆ map F which is then used in both activity map prediction and group activity recognition steps. The initial activity map A1 that contains individual and group activity maps in a spatial representation is generated by φ. Next, the activity map is refined in multiple stages using ˆ ψt. Finally, the aggregation component ζ combines the information from F and refined activity map AT to predict the final group activity label pˆ. LAt is the Euclidean loss between predicted and ground truth activity maps in stage t and LG is the cross entropy loss for group activity. The ground truth activity map A is composed of group activity map AG and individual activity map AI .