[CSEE Talk] talk: Visual understanding of human actions

[Tim Finin]

              Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
                University of Maryland, Baltimore County

                 Visual understanding of human actions

                          Dr. Hamed Pirsiavash
                    Postdoctoral Research Associate
        Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
                 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

            12:00-1:00pm Friday, 27 February, 2015, ITE 325B

The aim in computer vision is to develop algorithms for computers to
"see" the world as humans do. Central to this goal is understanding
human behavior as an intelligent agent functioning in the visual
world. For instance, in order for a robot to interact with us, it
should understand our actions to produce the proper response. My work
explores several directions towards computationally representing and
understanding human actions.

In this talk, I will focus on detecting actions and judging their
quality. First, I will describe simple grammars for modeling
long-scale temporal structure in human actions. Real-world videos are
typically composed of multiple action instances, where each instance
is itself composed of sub-actions with variable durations and
orderings. Our grammar models capture such hierarchical structure
while admitting efficient, linear-time parsing algorithms for action
detection. The second part of the talk will describe our algorithms
for going beyond detecting actions to judging how well they are
performed. Our learning-based framework provides feedback to the
performer to improve the quality of his/her actions.

Host: Mohamed Younis