Event Detection in Complex Scenes Using Interval Temporal Constraints

Yifan Zhang, Qiang Ji, Hanqing Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 3184-3191

In complex scenes with multiple atomic events happening sequentially or in parallel, detecting each individual event separately may not always obtain robust and reliable result. It is essential to detect them in a holistic way which incorporates the causality and temporal dependency among them to compensate the limitation of current computer vision techniques. In this paper, we propose an interval temporal constrained dynamic Bayesian network to extend Allen's interval algebra network (IAN) [2] from a deterministic static model to a probabilistic dynamic system, which can not only capture the complex interval temporal relationships, but also model the evolution dynamics and handle the uncertainty from the noisy visual observation. In the model, the topology of the IAN on each time slice and the interlinks between the time slices are discovered by an advanced structure learning method. The duration of the event and the unsynchronized time lags between two correlated event intervals are captured by a duration model, so that we can better determine the temporal boundary of the event. Empirical results on two real world datasets show the power of the proposed interval temporal constrained model.