Latent Hierarchical Model of Temporal Structure for Complex Activity Classification

Modeling the temporal structure of sub-activities is an important yet challenging problem in complex activity classification. This paper proposes a latent hierarchical model (LHM) to describe the decomposition of complex activity into sub-activities in a hierarchical way. The LHM has a tree-structure, where each node corresponds to a video segment (sub-activity) at certain temporal scale. The starting and ending time points of each sub-activity are represented by two latent variables, which are automatically determined during the inference process. We formulate the training problem of the LHM in a latent kernelized SVM framework and develop an efficient cascade inference method to speed up classification. The advantages of our methods come from: 1) LHM models the complex activity with a deep structure, which is decomposed into sub-activities in a coarse-to-fine manner and 2) the starting and ending time points of each segment are adaptively determined to deal with the temporal displacement and duration variation of sub-activity. We conduct experiments on three datasets: 1) the KTH; 2) the Hollywood2; and 3) the Olympic Sports. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the LHM in complex activity classification. With dense features, our LHM achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the Hollywood2 dataset and the Olympic Sports dataset.