Division of work during behaviour recognition - The SCENIC approach

Behaviour recognition in a video scene consists of several distinct sub-tasks: objects or object parts must be recognised, classified and tracked, qualitative spatial and temporal properties must be determined, behaviour of individual objects must be identified, and composite behaviours must be determined to obtain an interpretation of the scene as a whole. In this paper, we describe how these tasks can be distributed over three processing stages (low-level analysis, middle layer mediation and high-level interpretation) to obtain flexible and efficient bottom-up and top-down processing. The approach is implemented in the system SCENIC and currently applied to two domains: dynamic indoor scenes and static building scenes. We include details of an experiment where an ongoing table-laying scene is recognised.