No Arabic abstract
Action recognition is a key problem in computer vision that labels videos with a set of predefined actions. Capturing both, semantic content and motion, along the video frames is key to achieve high accuracy performance on this task. Most of the state-of-the-art methods rely on RGB frames for extracting the semantics and pre-computed optical flow fields as a motion cue. Then, both are combined using deep neural networks. Yet, it has been argued that such models are not able to leverage the motion information extracted from the optical flow, but instead the optical flow allows for better recognition of people and objects in the video. This urges the need to explore different cues or models that can extract motion in a more informative fashion. To tackle this issue, we propose to explore the predictive coding network, so called PredNet, a recurrent neural network that propagates predictive coding errors across layers and time steps. We analyze whether PredNet can better capture motions in videos by estimating over time the representations extracted from pre-trained networks for action recognition. In this way, the model only relies on the video frames, and does not need pre-processed optical flows as input. We report the effectiveness of our proposed model on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets.
Human observers can learn to recognize new categories of images from a handful of examples, yet doing so with artificial ones remains an open challenge. We hypothesize that data-efficient recognition is enabled by representations which make the variability in natural signals more predictable. We therefore revisit and improve Contrastive Predictive Coding, an unsupervised objective for learning such representations. This new implementation produces features which support state-of-the-art linear classification accuracy on the ImageNet dataset. When used as input for non-linear classification with deep neural networks, this representation allows us to use 2-5x less labels than classifiers trained directly on image pixels. Finally, this unsupervised representation substantially improves transfer learning to object detection on the PASCAL VOC dataset, surpassing fully supervised pre-trained ImageNet classifiers.
While deep feature learning has revolutionized techniques for static-image understanding, the same does not quite hold for video processing. Architectures and optimization techniques used for video are largely based off those for static images, potentially underutilizing rich video information. In this work, we rethink both the underlying network architecture and the stochastic learning paradigm for temporal data. To do so, we draw inspiration from classic theory on linear dynamic systems for modeling time series. By extending such models to include nonlinear mappings, we derive a series of novel recurrent neural networks that sequentially make top-down predictions about the future and then correct those predictions with bottom-up observations. Predictive-corrective networks have a number of desirable properties: (1) they can adaptively focus computation on surprising frames where predictions require large corrections, (2) they simplify learning in that only residual-like corrective terms need to be learned over time and (3) they naturally decorrelate an input data stream in a hierarchical fashion, producing a more reliable signal for learning at each layer of a network. We provide an extensive analysis of our lightweight and interpretable framework, and demonstrate that our model is competitive with the two-stream network on three challenging datasets without the need for computationally expensive optical flow.
The quality of data representation in deep learning methods is directly related to the prior model imposed on the representations; however, generally used fixed priors are not capable of adjusting to the context in the data. To address this issue, we propose deep predictive coding networks, a hierarchical generative model that empirically alters priors on the latent representations in a dynamic and context-sensitive manner. This model captures the temporal dependencies in time-varying signals and uses top-down information to modulate the representation in lower layers. The centerpiece of our model is a novel procedure to infer sparse states of a dynamic model which is used for feature extraction. We also extend this feature extraction block to introduce a pooling function that captures locally invariant representations. When applied on a natural video data, we show that our method is able to learn high-level visual features. We also demonstrate the role of the top-down connections by showing the robustness of the proposed model to structured noise.
In this work, we propose Knowledge Integration Networks (referred as KINet) for video action recognition. KINet is capable of aggregating meaningful context features which are of great importance to identifying an action, such as human information and scene context. We design a three-branch architecture consisting of a main branch for action recognition, and two auxiliary branches for human parsing and scene recognition which allow the model to encode the knowledge of human and scene for action recognition. We explore two pre-trained models as teacher networks to distill the knowledge of human and scene for training the auxiliary tasks of KINet. Furthermore, we propose a two-level knowledge encoding mechanism which contains a Cross Branch Integration (CBI) module for encoding the auxiliary knowledge into medium-level convolutional features, and an Action Knowledge Graph (AKG) for effectively fusing high-level context information. This results in an end-to-end trainable framework where the three tasks can be trained collaboratively, allowing the model to compute strong context knowledge efficiently. The proposed KINet achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a large-scale action recognition benchmark Kinetics-400, with a top-1 accuracy of 77.8%. We further demonstrate that our KINet has strong capability by transferring the Kinetics-trained model to UCF-101, where it obtains 97.8% top-1 accuracy.
Temporal modeling in videos is a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Bilinear (TB) model to capture the temporal pairwise feature interactions between adjacent frames. Compared with some existing temporal methods which are limited in linear transformations, our TB model considers explicit quadratic bilinear transformations in the temporal domain for motion evolution and sequential relation modeling. We further leverage the factorized bilinear model in linear complexity and a bottleneck network design to build our TB blocks, which also constrains the parameters and computation cost. We consider two schemes in terms of the incorporation of TB blocks and the original 2D spatial convolutions, namely wide and deep Temporal Bilinear Networks (TBN). Finally, we perform experiments on several widely adopted datasets including Kinetics, UCF101 and HMDB51. The effectiveness of our TBNs is validated by comprehensive ablation analyses and comparisons with various state-of-the-art methods.