  Rather than simply recognizing the action of a person individually,
collective activity recognition aims to find out what a group of people is
acting in a collective scene. Previ- ous state-of-the-art methods using
hand-crafted potentials in conventional graphical model which can only define a
limited range of relations. Thus, the complex structural de- pendencies among
individuals involved in a collective sce- nario cannot be fully modeled. In
this paper, we overcome these limitations by embedding latent variables into
feature space and learning the feature mapping functions in a deep learning
framework. The embeddings of latent variables build a global relation
containing person-group interac- tions and richer contextual information by
jointly modeling broader range of individuals. Besides, we assemble atten- tion
mechanism during embedding for achieving more com- pact representations. We
evaluate our method on three col- lective activity datasets, where we
contribute a much larger dataset in this work. The proposed model has achieved
clearly better performance as compared to the state-of-the- art methods in our
experiments.
