Abstract

This paper addresses a new problem, that of multiscale activity recognition. Our goal is to detect and localize a wide range of activities, includ- ing individual actions and group activities, which may simultaneously co-occur in high-resolution video. The video resolution allows for digital zoom-in (or zoom- out) for examining fine details (or coarser scales), as needed for recognition. The key challenge is how to avoid running a multitude of detectors at all spatiotem- poral scales, and yet arrive at a holistically consistent video interpretation. To this end, we use a three-layered AND-OR graph to jointly model group activities, individual actions, and participating objects. The AND-OR graph allows a princi- pled formulation of efficient, cost-sensitive inference via an explore-exploit strat- egy. Our inference optimally schedules the following computational processes: 1) direct application of activity detectors – called  process; 2) bottom-up inference based on detecting activity parts – called  process; and 3) top-down inference based on detecting activity context – called  process. The scheduling iteratively maximizes the log-posteriors of the resulting parse graphs. For evaluation, we have compiled and benchmarked a new dataset of high-resolution videos of group and individual activities co-occurring in a courtyard of the UCLA campus.