How Deep Features Have Improved Event Recognition in Multimedia: A Survey

Event recognition is one of the areas in multimedia that is attracting great attention of researchers. Being applicable in a wide range of applications, from personal to collective events, a number of interesting solutions for event recognition using multimedia information sources have been proposed. On the other hand, following their immense success in classification, object recognition, and detection, deep learning has been shown to perform well in event recognition tasks also. Thus, a large portion of the literature on event analysis relies nowadays on deep learning architectures. In this article, we provide an extensive overview of the existing literature in this field, analyzing how deep features and deep learning architectures have changed the performance of event recognition frameworks. The literature on event-based analysis of multimedia contents can be categorized into four groups, namely (i) event recognition in single images; (ii) event recognition in personal photo collections; (iii) event recognition in videos; and (iv) event recognition in audio recordings. In this article, we extensively review different deep-learning-based frameworks for event recognition in these four domains. Furthermore, we also review some benchmark datasets made available to the scientific community to validate novel event recognition pipelines. In the final part of the manuscript, we also provide a detailed discussion on basic insights gathered from the literature review, and identify future trends and challenges.