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.

This work aims for image categorization by learning a representation of discriminative parts. Different from most existing part-based methods, we argue that parts are naturally shared between image categories and should be modeled as such. We motivate our approach with a quantitative and qualitative analysis by backtracking where selected parts come from. Our analysis shows that in addition to the category parts defining the category, the parts coming from the background context and parts from other image categories improve categorization performance. Part selection should not be done separately for each category, but instead be shared and optimized over all categories. To incorporate part sharing between categories, we present an algorithm based on AdaBoost to optimize part sharing and selection, as well as fusion with the global image representation. With a single algorithm and without the need for task-specific optimization, we achieve results competitive to the state-of-the-art on object, scene, and action categories, further improving over deep convolutional neural networks and alternative part representations.

We strive for spatio-temporal localization of actions in videos. The state-of-the-art relies on action proposals at test time and selects the best one with a classifier trained on carefully annotated box annotations. Annotating action boxes in video is cumbersome, tedious, and error prone. Rather than annotating boxes, we propose to annotate actions in video with points on a sparse subset of frames only. We introduce an overlap measure between action proposals and points and incorporate them all into the objective of a non-convex Multiple Instance Learning optimization. Experimental evaluation on the UCF Sports and UCF 101 datasets shows that (i) spatio-temporal proposals can be used to train classifiers while retaining the localization performance, (ii) point annotations yield results comparable to box annotations while being significantly faster to annotate, (iii) with a minimum amount of supervision our approach is competitive to the state-of-the-art. Finally, we introduce spatio-temporal action annotations on the train and test videos of Hollywood2, resulting in Hollywood2Tubes, available at http://tinyurl.com/hollywood2tubes.