# On Flow Profile Image for Video Representation

## TL;DR

This paper introduces Flow Profile Images (FPI), a novel compact representation of video frames capturing motion and appearance, validated through activity recognition experiments and outperforming existing techniques.

## Contribution

It proposes a new method to encode motion and appearance into a single image using optical flow and optimization, advancing video representation techniques.

## Key findings

- FPIs effectively encode motion and appearance information.
- Experimental results outperform existing video representation methods.
- Visual quality of FPIs is validated in activity recognition tasks.

## Abstract

Video representation is a key challenge in many computer vision applications such as video classification, video captioning, and video surveillance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for video representation that captures meaningful information including motion and appearance from a sequence of video frames and compacts it into a single image. To this end, we compute the optical flow and use it in a least squares optimization to find a new image, the so-called Flow Profile Image (FPI). This image encodes motions as well as foreground appearance information while background information is removed. The quality of this image is validated in activity recognition experiments and the results are compared with other video representation techniques such as dynamic images [1] and eigen images [2]. The experimental results as well as visual quality confirm that FPIs can be successfully used in video processing applications.