DECK: Discovering Event Composition Knowledge from Web Images for Zero-Shot Event Detection and Recounting in Videos

Abstract

We address the problem of zero-shot event recognition in consumer videos. An event usually consists of multiple human-human and human-object interactions over a relative long period of time. A common approach proceeds by representing videos with banks of object and action concepts, but requires additional user inputs to specify the desired concepts per event. In this paper, we provide a fully automatic algorithm to select representative and reliable concepts for event queries. This is achieved by discovering event composition knowledge (DECK) from web images. To evaluate our proposed method, we use the standard zero-shot event detection protocol (ZeroMED), but also introduce a novel zero-shot event recounting (ZeroMER) problem to select supporting evidence of the events. Our ZeroMER formulation aims to select video snippets that are relevant and diverse. Evaluation on the challenging TRECVID MED dataset show that our proposed method achieves promising results on both tasks.