A database for fine grained activity detection of cooking activities

While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.