From Stochastic Grammar to Bayes Network: Probabilistic Parsing of Complex Activity

Nam N. Vo, Aaron F. Bobick; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 2641-2648

We propose a probabilistic method for parsing a temporal sequence such as a complex activity defined as composition of sub-activities/actions. The temporal structure of the high-level activity is represented by a string-length limited stochastic context-free grammar. Given the grammar, a Bayes network, which we term Sequential Interval Network (SIN), is generated where the variable nodes correspond to the start and end times of component actions. The network integrates information about the duration of each primitive action, visual detection results for each primitive action, and the activity's temporal structure. At any moment in time during the activity, message passing is used to perform exact inference yielding the posterior probabilities of the start and end times for each different activity/action. We provide demonstrations of this framework being applied to vision tasks such as action prediction, classification of the high-level activities or temporal segmentation of a test sequence; the method is also applicable in Human Robot Interaction domain where continual prediction of human action is needed.