Spatio-Temporal Interest Points Chain (STIPC) for activity recognition

We present a novel feature, named Spatio-Temporal Interest Points Chain (STIPC), for activity representation and recognition. This new feature consists of a set of trackable spatio-temporal interest points, which correspond to a series of discontinuous motion among a long-term motion of an object or its part. By this chain feature, we can not only capture the discriminative motion information which space-time interest point-like feature try to pursue, but also build the connection between them. Specifically, we first extract the point trajectories from the image sequences, then partition the points on each trajectory into two kinds of different yet close related points: discontinuous motion points and continuous motion points. We extract local space-time features around discontinuous motion points and use a chain model to represent them. Furthermore, we introduce a chain descriptor to encode the temporal relationships between these interdependent local space-time features. The experimental results on challenging datasets show that our STIPC features improves local space-time features and achieve state-of-the-art results.