Extracting motion features for visual human activity representation

This paper presents a technique to characterize human actions in visual surveillance scenarios in order to describe, in a qualitative way, basic human movements in general imaging conditions. The representation proposed is based on focus of attention concepts, as part of an active tracking process to describe target movements. The introduced representation, named “focus of attention” representation, FOA, is based on motion information. A segmentation method is also presented to group the FOA in uniform temporal segments. The segmentation will allow providing a higher level description of human actions, by means of further classifying each segment in different types of basic movements.