Featureless: Bypassing feature extraction in action categorization

This method introduces an efficient manner of learning action categories without the need of feature estimation. The approach starts from low-level values, in a similar style to the successful CNN methods. However, rather than extracting general image features, we learn to predict specific video representations from raw video data. The benefit of such an approach is that at the same computational expense it can predict 2D video representations as well as 3D ones, based on motion. The proposed model relies on discriminative Wald-boost, which we enhance to a multiclass formulation for the purpose of learning video representations. The suitability of the proposed approach as well as its time efficiency are tested on the UCF11 action recognition dataset.