Conceptlets: Selective Semantics for Classifying Video Events

An emerging trend in video event classification is to learn an event from a bank of concept detector scores. Different from existing work, which simply relies on a bank containing all available detectors, we propose in this paper an algorithm that learns from examples what concepts in a bank are most informative per event, which we call the conceptlet. We model finding the conceptlet out of a large set of concept detectors as an importance sampling problem. Our proposed approximate algorithm finds the optimal conceptlet using a cross-entropy optimization. We study the behavior of video event classification based on conceptlets by performing four experiments on challenging internet video from the 2010 and 2012 TRECVID multimedia event detection tasks and Columbia's consumer video dataset. Starting from a concept bank of more than thousand precomputed detectors, our experiments establish there are (sets of) individual concept detectors that are more discriminative and appear to be more descriptive for a particular event than others, event classification using an automatically obtained conceptlet is more robust than using all available concepts, and conceptlets obtained with our cross-entropy algorithm are better than conceptlets from state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms. What is more, the conceptlets make sense for the events of interest, without being programmed to do so.