Discovering Activities and Their Temporal Significance

In this paper, we address the problem of discovering activities and their temporal significance in an area under surveillance. Discovering activities along with its expectation of occurrence at a particular time plays an important role in many surveillance applications. We propose an unsupervised model, called Time pLSA model, that extends the probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) model to jointly capture the activities and their behaviour over time. We use adaptive background subtraction to detect spatio-temporal patches, which are used as feature representation for activity patterns. Each of these patches are associated with the time slot in which they occur. Multinomial distributions are used to model both activities as distribution over spatio-temporal patches and time significance as distribution over the time-line. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a real life surveillance feed of an outdoor scene.