Abstract

We propose a method for learning discriminative category- level features and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on large-scale action recognition in video. The key observation is that one-vs-rest clas- sifiers, which are ubiquitously employed for this task, face challenges in separating very similar categories (such as running vs. jogging). Our proposed method automatically identifies such pairs of categories using a criterion of mutual pairwise proximity in the (kernelized) feature space, using a category-level similarity matrix where each entry corresponds to the one-vs-one SVM margin for pairs of categories. We then exploit the observation that while splitting such “Siamese Twin” categories may be difficult, separating them from the remaining categories in a two-vs-rest framework is not. This enables us to augment one-vs-rest classifiers with a judicious selection of “two-vs-rest” classifier outputs, formed from such discriminative and mutually nearest (DaMN) pairs. By combining one- vs-rest and two-vs-rest features in a principled probabilistic manner, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets. More importantly, the same DaMN features, when treated as a mid-level representation also outperform existing methods in knowledge transfer experiments, both cross-dataset from UCF101 to HMDB51 and to new categories with limited training data (one-shot and few-shot learning). Finally, we study the generality of the proposed approach by applying DaMN to other classification tasks; our experiments show that DaMN outperforms related approaches in direct comparisons, not only on video action recognition but also on their original image dataset tasks.