Recognizing physical activity from ego-motion of a camera

A new image based activity recognition method for a person wearing a video camera below the neck is presented in this paper. The wearable device is used to capture video data in front of the wearer. Although the wearer never appears in the video, his or her physical activity is analyzed and recognized using the recorded scene changes resulting from the motion of the wearer. Correspondence features are extracted from adjacent frames and inaccurate matches are removed based on a set of constraints imposed by the camera model. Motion histograms are defined and calculated within a frame and we define a new feature called accumulated motion distribution derived from motion statistics in each frame. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is trained with this feature and used to classify physical activities in different scenes. Our results show that different types of activities can be recognized in low resolution, field acquired real-world video.