Sum-product networks for modeling activities with stochastic structure

This paper addresses recognition of human activities with stochastic structure, characterized by variable spacetime arrangements of primitive actions, and conducted by a variable number of actors. We demonstrate that modeling aggregate counts of visual words is surprisingly expressive enough for such a challenging recognition task. An activity is represented by a sum-product network (SPN). SPN is a mixture of bags-of-words (BoWs) with exponentially many mixture components, where subcomponents are reused by larger ones. SPN consists of terminal nodes representing BoWs, and product and sum nodes organized in a number of layers. The products are aimed at encoding particular configurations of primitive actions, and the sums serve to capture their alternative configurations. The connectivity of SPN and parameters of BoW distributions are learned under weak supervision using the EM algorithm. SPN inference amounts to parsing the SPN graph, which yields the most probable explanation (MPE) ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Mohamed R. Amer, Sinisa Todorovic
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Cvpr 2012, EM Algorithm, Linear Complexity, Mixture Components