No Arabic abstract
Motion has shown to be useful for video understanding, where motion is typically represented by optical flow. However, computing flow from video frames is very time-consuming. Recent works directly leverage the motion vectors and residuals readily available in the compressed video to represent motion at no cost. While this avoids flow computation, it also hurts accuracy since the motion vector is noisy and has substantially reduced resolution, which makes it a less discriminative motion representation. To remedy these issues, we propose a lightweight generator network, which reduces noises in motion vectors and captures fine motion details, achieving a more Discriminative Motion Cue (DMC) representation. Since optical flow is a more accurate motion representation, we train the DMC generator to approximate flow using a reconstruction loss and a generative adversarial loss, jointly with the downstream action classification task. Extensive evaluations on three action recognition benchmarks (HMDB-51, UCF-101, and a subset of Kinetics) confirm the effectiveness of our method. Our full system, consisting of the generator and the classifier, is coined as DMC-Net which obtains high accuracy close to that of using flow and runs two orders of magnitude faster than using optical flow at inference time.
Training robust deep video representations has proven to be much more challenging than learning deep image representations. This is in part due to the enormous size of raw video streams and the high temporal redundancy; the true and interesting signal is often drowned in too much irrelevant data. Motivated by that the superfluous information can be reduced by up to two orders of magnitude by video compression (using H.264, HEVC, etc.), we propose to train a deep network directly on the compressed video. This representation has a higher information density, and we found the training to be easier. In addition, the signals in a compressed video provide free, albeit noisy, motion information. We propose novel techniques to use them effectively. Our approach is about 4.6 times faster than Res3D and 2.7 times faster than ResNet-152. On the task of action recognition, our approach outperforms all the other methods on the UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Charades dataset.
Although CNN has reached satisfactory performance in image-related tasks, using CNN to process videos is much more challenging due to the enormous size of raw video streams. In this work, we propose to use motion vectors and residuals from modern video compression techniques to effectively learn the representation of the raw frames and greatly remove the temporal redundancy, giving a faster video processing model. Compressed Video Action Recognition(CoViAR) has explored to directly use compressed video to train the deep neural network, where the motion vectors were utilized to present temporal information. However, motion vector is designed for minimizing video size where precise motion information is not obligatory. Compared with optical flow, motion vectors contain noisy and unreliable motion information. Inspired by the mechanism of video compression codecs, we propose an approach to refine the motion vectors where unreliable movement will be removed while temporal information is largely reserved. We prove that replacing the original motion vector with refined one and using the same network as CoViAR has achieved state-of-art performance on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 with negligible efficiency degrades comparing with original CoViAR.
Two-stream networks have achieved great success in video recognition. A two-stream network combines a spatial stream of RGB frames and a temporal stream of Optical Flow to make predictions. However, the temporal redundancy of RGB frames as well as the high-cost of optical flow computation creates challenges for both the performance and efficiency. Recent works instead use modern compressed video modalities as an alternative to the RGB spatial stream and improve the inference speed by orders of magnitudes. Previous works create one stream for each modality which are combined with an additional temporal stream through late fusion. This is redundant since some modalities like motion vectors already contain temporal information. Based on this observation, we propose a compressed domain two-stream network IP TSN for compressed video recognition, where the two streams are represented by the two types of frames (I and P frames) in compressed videos, without needing a separate temporal stream. With this goal, we propose to fully exploit the motion information of P-stream through generalized distillation from optical flow, which largely improves the efficiency and accuracy. Our P-stream runs 60 times faster than using optical flow while achieving higher accuracy. Our full IP TSN, evaluated over public action recognition benchmarks (UCF101, HMDB51 and a subset of Kinetics), outperforms other compressed domain methods by large margins while improving the total inference speed by 20%.
State-of-the-art video action recognition models with complex network architecture have archived significant improvements, but these models heavily depend on large-scale well-labeled datasets. To reduce such dependency, we propose a self-supervised teacher-student architecture, i.e., the Differentiated Teachers Guided self-supervised Network (DTG-Net). In DTG-Net, except for reducing labeled data dependency by self-supervised learning (SSL), pre-trained action related models are used as teacher guidance providing prior knowledge to alleviate the demand for a large number of unlabeled videos in SSL. Specifically, leveraging the years of effort in action-related tasks, e.g., image classification, image-based action recognition, the DTG-Net learns the self-supervised video representation under various teacher guidance, i.e., those well-trained models of action-related tasks. Meanwhile, the DTG-Net is optimized in the way of contrastive self-supervised learning. When two image sequences are randomly sampled from the same video or different videos as the positive or negative pairs, respectively, they are then sent to the teacher and student networks for feature embedding. After that, the contrastive feature consistency is defined between features embedding of each pair, i.e., consistent for positive pair and inconsistent for negative pairs. Meanwhile, to reflect various teacher tasks different guidance, we also explore different weighted guidance on teacher tasks. Finally, the DTG-Net is evaluated in two ways: (i) the self-supervised DTG-Net to pre-train the supervised action recognition models with only unlabeled videos; (ii) the supervised DTG-Net to be jointly trained with the supervised action networks in an end-to-end way. Its performance is better than most pre-training methods but also has excellent competitiveness compared to supervised action recognition methods.
Video action recognition, which is topical in computer vision and video analysis, aims to allocate a short video clip to a pre-defined category such as brushing hair or climbing stairs. Recent works focus on action recognition with deep neural networks that achieve state-of-the-art results in need of high-performance platforms. Despite the fast development of mobile computing, video action recognition on mobile devices has not been fully discussed. In this paper, we focus on the novel mobile video action recognition task, where only the computational capabilities of mobile devices are accessible. Instead of raw videos with huge storage, we choose to extract multiple modalities (including I-frames, motion vectors, and residuals) directly from compressed videos. By employing MobileNetV2 as backbone, we propose a novel Temporal Trilinear Pooling (TTP) module to fuse the multiple modalities for mobile video action recognition. In addition to motion vectors, we also provide a temporal fusion method to explicitly induce the temporal context. The efficiency test on a mobile device indicates that our model can perform mobile video action recognition at about 40FPS. The comparative results on two benchmarks show that our model outperforms existing action recognition methods in model size and time consuming, but with competitive accuracy.