No Arabic abstract
Despite the recent success of neural networks in image feature learning, a major problem in the video domain is the lack of sufficient labeled data for learning to model temporal information. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised temporal modeling method that learns from untrimmed videos. The speed of motion varies constantly, e.g., a man may run quickly or slowly. We therefore train a Multirate Visual Recurrent Model (MVRM) by encoding frames of a clip with different intervals. This learning process makes the learned model more capable of dealing with motion speed variance. Given a clip sampled from a video, we use its past and future neighboring clips as the temporal context, and reconstruct the two temporal transitions, i.e., present$rightarrow$past transition and present$rightarrow$future transition, reflecting the temporal information in different views. The proposed method exploits the two transitions simultaneously by incorporating a bidirectional reconstruction which consists of a backward reconstruction and a forward reconstruction. We apply the proposed method to two challenging video tasks, i.e., complex event detection and video captioning, in which it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our method generates the best single feature for event detection with a relative improvement of 10.4% on the MEDTest-13 dataset and achieves the best performance in video captioning across all evaluation metrics on the YouTube2Text dataset.
Temporal relational reasoning, the ability to link meaningful transformations of objects or entities over time, is a fundamental property of intelligent species. In this paper, we introduce an effective and interpretable network module, the Temporal Relation Network (TRN), designed to learn and reason about temporal dependencies between video frames at multiple time scales. We evaluate TRN-equipped networks on activity recognition tasks using three recent video datasets - Something-Something, Jester, and Charades - which fundamentally depend on temporal relational reasoning. Our results demonstrate that the proposed TRN gives convolutional neural networks a remarkable capacity to discover temporal relations in videos. Through only sparsely sampled video frames, TRN-equipped networks can accurately predict human-object interactions in the Something-Something dataset and identify various human gestures on the Jester dataset with very competitive performance. TRN-equipped networks also outperform two-stream networks and 3D convolution networks in recognizing daily activities in the Charades dataset. Further analyses show that the models learn intuitive and interpretable visual common sense knowledge in videos.
In this paper, we introduce Coarse-Fine Networks, a two-stream architecture which benefits from different abstractions of temporal resolution to learn better video representations for long-term motion. Traditional Video models process inputs at one (or few) fixed temporal resolution without any dynamic frame selection. However, we argue that, processing multiple temporal resolutions of the input and doing so dynamically by learning to estimate the importance of each frame can largely improve video representations, specially in the domain of temporal activity localization. To this end, we propose (1) Grid Pool, a learned temporal downsampling layer to extract coarse features, and, (2) Multi-stage Fusion, a spatio-temporal attention mechanism to fuse a fine-grained context with the coarse features. We show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts for action detection in public datasets including Charades with a significantly reduced compute and memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/kkahatapitiya/Coarse-Fine-Networks
Temporal sentence grounding in videos aims to detect and localize one target video segment, which semantically corresponds to a given sentence. Existing methods mainly tackle this task via matching and aligning semantics between a sentence and candidate video segments, while neglect the fact that the sentence information plays an important role in temporally correlating and composing the described contents in videos. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic conditioned dynamic modulation (SCDM) mechanism, which relies on the sentence semantics to modulate the temporal convolution operations for better correlating and composing the sentence related video contents over time. More importantly, the proposed SCDM performs dynamically with respect to the diverse video contents so as to establish a more precise matching relationship between sentence and video, thereby improving the temporal grounding accuracy. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-arts with clear margins, illustrating the ability of SCDM to better associate and localize relevant video contents for temporal sentence grounding. Our code for this paper is available at https://github.com/yytzsy/SCDM .
Existing methods for instance segmentation in videos typi-cally involve multi-stage pipelines that follow the tracking-by-detectionparadigm and model a video clip as a sequence of images. Multiple net-works are used to detect objects in individual frames, and then associatethese detections over time. Hence, these methods are often non-end-to-end trainable and highly tailored to specific tasks. In this paper, we pro-pose a different approach that is well-suited to a variety of tasks involvinginstance segmentation in videos. In particular, we model a video clip asa single 3D spatio-temporal volume, and propose a novel approach thatsegments and tracks instances across space and time in a single stage. Ourproblem formulation is centered around the idea of spatio-temporal em-beddings which are trained to cluster pixels belonging to a specific objectinstance over an entire video clip. To this end, we introduce (i) novel mix-ing functions that enhance the feature representation of spatio-temporalembeddings, and (ii) a single-stage, proposal-free network that can rea-son about temporal context. Our network is trained end-to-end to learnspatio-temporal embeddings as well as parameters required to clusterthese embeddings, thus simplifying inference. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets and tasks. Code and modelsare available at https://github.com/sabarim/STEm-Seg.
Video captioning aims to automatically generate natural language descriptions of video content, which has drawn a lot of attention recent years. Generating accurate and fine-grained captions needs to not only understand the global content of video, but also capture the detailed object information. Meanwhile, video representations have great impact on the quality of generated captions. Thus, it is important for video captioning to capture salient objects with their detailed temporal dynamics, and represent them using discriminative spatio-temporal representations. In this paper, we propose a new video captioning approach based on object-aware aggregation with bidirectional temporal graph (OA-BTG), which captures detailed temporal dynamics for salient objects in video, and learns discriminative spatio-temporal representations by performing object-aware local feature aggregation on detected object regions. The main novelties and advantages are: (1) Bidirectional temporal graph: A bidirectional temporal graph is constructed along and reversely along the temporal order, which provides complementary ways to capture the temporal trajectories for each salient object. (2) Object-aware aggregation: Learnable VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors) models are constructed on object temporal trajectories and global frame sequence, which performs object-aware aggregation to learn discriminative representations. A hierarchical attention mechanism is also developed to distinguish different contributions of multiple objects. Experiments on two widely-used datasets demonstrate our OA-BTG achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of BLEU@4, METEOR and CIDEr metrics.