Complex Activity Recognition using Granger Constrained DBN (GCDBN) in Sports and Surveillance Video

Modeling interactions of multiple co-occurring objects in a complex activity is becoming increasingly popular in the video domain. The Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) has been applied to this problem in the past due to its natural ability to statistically capture complex temporal dependencies. However, standard DBN structure learning algorithms are generatively learned, require manual structure definitions, and/or are computationally complex or restrictive. We propose a novel structure learning solution that fuses the Granger Causality statistic, a direct measure of temporal dependence, with the Adaboost feature selection algorithm to automatically constrain the temporal links of a DBN in a discriminative manner. This approach enables us to completely define the DBN structure prior to parameter learning, which reduces computational complexity in addition to providing a more descriptive structure. We refer to this modeling approach as the Granger Constraints DBN (GCDBN). Our experiments show how the GCDBN outperforms two of the most relevant state-of-the-art graphical models in complex activity classification on handball video data, surveillance data, and synthetic data.