Describing Common Human Visual Actions in Images

Matteo Ruggero Ronchi and Pietro Perona

Abstract

Which common human actions and interactions are recognizable in monocular still images? Which involve objects and/or other people? How many is a person performing at a time? We address these questions by exploring the actions and interactions that are detectable in the images of the MS COCO dataset. We make two main contributions. First, a list of 140 common `visual actions', obtained by analyzing the largest on-line verb lexicon currently available for English (VerbNet) and human sentences used to describe images in MS COCO. Second, a complete set of annotations for those `visual actions', composed of subject-object and associated verb, which we call COCO-a (a for `actions'). COCO-a is larger than existing action datasets in terms of number instances of actions, and is unique because it is data-driven, rather than experimenter-biased. Other unique features are that it is exhaustive, and that all subjects and objects are localized. A statistical analysis of the accuracy of our annotations and of each action, interaction and subject-object combination is provided.

Session

Poster 1

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DOI

10.5244/C.29.52
https://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.29.52

Citation

Matteo Ruggero Ronchi and Pietro Perona. Describing Common Human Visual Actions in Images. In Xianghua Xie, Mark W. Jones, and Gary K. L. Tam, editors, Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), pages 52.1-52.12. BMVA Press, September 2015.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{BMVC2015_52,
	title={Describing Common Human Visual Actions in Images},
	author={Matteo Ruggero Ronchi and Pietro Perona},
	year={2015},
	month={September},
	pages={52.1-52.12},
	articleno={52},
	numpages={12},
	booktitle={Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)},
	publisher={BMVA Press},
	editor={Xianghua Xie, Mark W. Jones, and Gary K. L. Tam},
	doi={10.5244/C.29.52},
	isbn={1-901725-53-7},
	url={https://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.29.52}
}