Compact representation for large-scale unconstrained video analysis

Abstract

Recently, newly invented features (e.g. Fisher vector, VLAD) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in large-scale video analysis systems that aims to understand the contents in videos, such as concept recognition and event detection. However, these features are in high-dimensional representations, which remarkably increases computation costs and correspondingly deteriorates the performance of subsequent learning tasks. Notably, the situation becomes even worse when dealing with large-scale video data where the number of class labels are limited. To address this problem, we propose a novel algorithm to compactly represent huge amounts of unconstrained video data. Specifically, redundant feature dimensions are removed by using our proposed feature selection algorithm. Considering unlabeled videos that are easy to obtain on the web, we apply this feature selection algorithm in a semi-supervised framework coping with a shortage of class information. Different from most of the existing semi-supervised feature selection algorithms, our proposed algorithm does not rely on manifold approximation, i.e. graph Laplacian, which is quite expensive for a large number of data. Thus, it is possible to apply the proposed algorithm to a real large-scale video analysis system. Besides, due to the difficulty of solving the non-smooth objective function, we develop an efficient iterative approach to seeking the global optimum. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real-world video datasets, including KTH, CCV, and HMDB. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.