Developing computer vision sensing systems that work robustly in everyday environments will require that the systems can recognize structured  interaction between people and objects in the world. This document presents a new theory for the representation and recognition of coordinated multi-agent action from noisy perceptual data.

The thesis of this work is as follows: highly structured, multi-agent action can be recognized from noisy perceptual data using visually grounded goal-based primitives and low-order temporal relationships that are integrated in a probabilistic framework. The theory is developed and evaluated by examining general characteristics of multi-agent action, analyzing tradeoffs involved when selecting a representation for multi-agent action recognition, and constructing a system to recognize multi-agent action for a real task from noisy data.

The representation, which is motivated by work in model-based object recognition and probabilistic plan recognition, makes four principal assumptions: (1) the goals of individual agents are temporal relationships between agents engaged in group activities, (2) a high-level description of temporal structure of the action using a small set of low-order temporal and logical constraints is adequate for representing the relationships between the agent goals for highly structured, multi-agent action recognition, (3) Bayesian networks provide a suitable mechanism for integrating multiple sources of uncertain visual perceptual feature evidence, and (4) an automatically generated Bayesian network can be used to combine uncertain temporal information and compute the likelihood that a set of object trajectory data is a particular multi-agent action.

The recognition algorithm is tested using a database of American football play descriptions. A system is described that can recognize single-agent and multi-agent actions in this domain given noisy trajectories of object movements. The strengths and limitations of the recognition system are discussed and compared with other multi-agent recognition algorithms.

Action recognition, motion understanding, knowledge representation, plan recognition, multiple agents