Multi-Task Clustering of Human Actions by Sharing Information

Sharing information between multiple tasks can enhance the accuracy of human action recognition systems. However, using shared information to improve multi-task human action clustering has never been considered before, and cannot be achieved using existing clustering methods. In this work, we present a novel and effective Multi-Task Information Bottleneck (MTIB) clustering method, which is capable of exploring the shared information between multiple action clustering tasks to improve the performance of individual task. Our motivation is that, different action collections always share many similar action patterns, and exploiting the shared information can lead to improved performance. Specifically, MTIB generally formulates this problem as an information loss minimization function. In this function, the shared information can be quantified by the distributional correlation of clusters in different tasks, which is based on a high-level common vocabulary constructed through a novel agglomerative information maximization method. Extensive experiments on two kinds of challenging data sets, including realistic action data sets (HMDB & UCF50, Olympic & YouTube), and cross-view data sets (IXMAS, WVU), show that the proposed approach compares favorably to the state-of-the-art methods.