Retrieving, annotating and recognizing human activities in web videos

Abstract

Recent e orts in computer vision tackle the problem of human activity understanding in video sequences. Traditionally, these algorithms require annotated video data to learn models. In this work, we introduce a novel data collection framework, to take advantage of the large amount of video data available on the web. We use this new framework to retrieve videos of human activities, and build training and evaluation datasets for computer vision algorithms. We rely on Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to obtain high accuracy annotations. An agglomerative clustering technique brings the possibility to achieve reliable and consistent annotations for temporal localization of human activities in videos. Using two datasets, Olympics Sports and our novel Daily Human Activities dataset, we show that our collection/annotation framework can make robust annotations of human activities in large amount of video data