Irfan Essa’s Academic Activities

• R. Hamid, S. Maddi, A. Bobick, I. Essa (2007). Structure from Statistics - Unsupervised Activity Analysis using Suffix Trees, At theInternational Conference on Computer Vision 2007. October 2007, Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL

Abstract

Models of activity structure for unconstrained environments are generally not available a priori. Recent representational approaches to this end are limited by their computational complexity, and ability to capture activity structure only up to some fixed temporal scale. In this work, we propose Suffix Trees as an activity representation to efficiently extract structure of activities by analyzing their constituent event-subsequences over multiple temporal scales. We empirically compare Suffix Trees with some of the previous approaches in terms of feature cardinality, discriminative prowess, noise sensitivity and activity-class discovery. Finally, exploiting properties of Suffix Trees, we present a novel perspective on anomalous subsequences of activities, and propose an algorithm to detect them in linear-time. We present comparative results over experimental data, collected from a kitchen environment to demonstrate the competence of our proposed framework.

• R. Hamid, S. Maddi, A. Bobick, I. Essa. “Unsupervised Analysis of Activity Sequences Using Event Motifs”, In proceedings of 4th ACM International Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks (in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2006).

Abstract

We present an unsupervised framework to discover characterizations of everyday human activities, and demonstrate how such representations can be used to extract points of interest in event-streams. We begin with the usage of Suffix Trees as an efficient activity-representation to analyze the global structural information of activities, using their local event statistics over the entire continuum of their temporal resolution. Exploiting this representation, we discover characterizing event-subsequences and present their usage in an ensemble-based framework for activity classification. Finally, we propose a method to automatically detect subsequences of events that are locally atypical in a structural sense. Results over extensive data-sets, collected from multiple sensor-rich environments are presented, to show the competence and scalability of the proposed framework.