Video event classification using bag-of-words and string kernels

The recognition of events in videos is a relevant and challenging task of automatic semantic video analysis. At present one of the most successful frameworks, used for object recognition tasks, is the bag-of-words (BoW) approach. However it does not model the temporal information of the video stream. We are working at a novel method  to introduce temporal information within the BoW approach by modeling a video clip as a sequence of histograms of visual features, computed from each frame using the traditional BoW model. The sequences are treated as strings where each histogram is considered as a character. Event classification of these sequences of variable size, depending on the length of the video clip, are performed using SVM classifiers with a string kernel (e.g using the Needlemann-Wunsch edit distance). Experimental results, performed on two domains, soccer video and TRECVID 2005, demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach. Related Publication: Ballan, L., M. Bertini, A. Del Bimbo, and G. Serra, “Video Event […]


A SIFT-based forensic method for copy-move detection

In many application scenarios digital images play a basic role and often it is important to assess if their content is realistic or has been manipulated to mislead watcher’s opinion. Image forensics tools provide answers to similar questions. We are working on a novel method that focuses in particular on the problem of detecting if a feigned image has been created by cloning an area of the image onto another zone to make a duplication or to cancel something awkward. The proposed approach is based on SIFT features and allows both to understand if a copy-move attack has occurred and which are the image points involved, and, furthermore, to recover which has been the geometric transformation happened to perform cloning, by computing the transformation parameters. In fact when a copy-move attack takes place, usually an affine transformation is applied to the image patch selected to fit in a specified position according to that context. Our experimental results confirm that the […]