Event patches: Mining effective parts for event detection and understanding.

•We proposed the idea that only parts of the video are effective for event detection and strive to mine the definite Event Patches that contribute to defining an event.•We proposed a concatenated video segments representation (CVSeg) method.•We proposed a Sparse Coding based Video Patches Mining (SVPM) method, which successfully obtain event patches that related to the key visual concepts of each event.•The performance of event detection achieves an impressive improvement by using the mined Event Patches.