Boosted Markov Networks for Activity Recognition

We explore a framework called boosted Markov networks to combine the learning capacity of boosting and the rich modeling semantics of Markov netwvorks and applying the framework for video-based activity recognition. Importantly, we extend the framework to incorporate hidden variables. We show how the framework can be applied for both model learning and feature selection. We demonstrate that boosted Markov networks with hidden variables perform comparably with the standard maximum likelihood estimation. However, our framework is able to learn sparse models, and therefore can provide computational savings when the learned models are used for classification. 1