  We present a method for assessing skill from video, applicable to a variety
of tasks, ranging from surgery to drawing and rolling pizza dough. We formulate
the problem as pairwise (who's better?) and overall (who's best?) ranking of
video collections, using supervised deep ranking. We propose a novel loss
function that learns discriminative features when a pair of videos exhibit
variance in skill, and learns shared features when a pair of videos exhibit
comparable skill levels. Results demonstrate our method is applicable across
tasks, with the percentage of correctly ordered pairs of videos ranging from
70% to 83% for four datasets. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach via
sensitivity analysis of its parameters. We see this work as effort toward the
automated organization of how-to video collections and overall, generic skill
determination in video.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition