Real-world actions occur often in crowded, dynamic environments. This poses a difficult challenge for current approaches to video event detection because it is difficult to segment the actor from the background due to distracting motion from other objects in the scene. We propose a technique for event recognition in crowded videos that reliably identifies actions in the presence of partial occlusion and background clutter. Our approach is based on three key ideas: (1) we efficiently match the

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... lumetric representation of an event against oversegmented spatio-temporal video volumes; (2) we augment our shape-based features using flow; (3) rather than treating an event template as an atomic entity, we separately match by parts (both in space and time), enabling robustness against occlusions and actor variability. Our experiments on human actions, such as picking up a dropped object or waving in a crowd show reliable detection with few false positives.