Human Face Region Detection Driving Activity Recognition in Video

Automatic recognition of human actions from video signals is probably one of the most salient research topics of computer vision with a tremendous impact for many applications. In this chapter, the authors introduce a new descriptor, the Human Constrained Pixel Change History (HC-PCH), which is based on PCH but focuses on the human body movements over time. They propose a modification of the conventional PCH that entails the calculation of two probabilistic maps based on human face and body detection, respectively. These HC-PCH features are used as input to an HMM-based classification framework, which exploits redundant information from multiple streams by employing sophisticated fusion methods, resulting in enhanced activity recognition rates.