Contextual Action Recognition in Night-time video sequences

Contextual information is important for interpreting human actions especially when actions exhibit interactive relationship with their context. Contextual clues become even more crucial when videos are captured in unfavorable conditions like extreme low light nighttime scenarios. These conditions encourage the use of multi-senor imagery and context enhancement. In this paper, we explore the importance of contextual knowledge for recognizing human actions in multi-sensor nighttime videos. Information fusion is utilized for encapsulating visual information about actions and their context. Space-time action information is contained using 3D fourier transform of fused action silhouette volume. In parallel, SIFT context images are extracted and fused using principal component analysis based feature fusion for each action class. Contextual dissimilarity is penalized by minimizing context SIFT flow energy. The action dataset comprises multi-sensor night vision video data from infra-red and visible spectrum. Experimental results show that fused contextual action information boost action recognition performance as compared to the baseline action recognition approach.