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We consider two less-emphasized temporal properties of video: 1. Temporal cues are fine-grained; 2. Temporal modeling needs reasoning. To tackle both problems at once, we exploit approximated bilinear modules (ABMs) for temporal modeling. There are two main points making the modules effective: two-layer MLPs can be seen as a constraint approximation of bilinear operations, thus can be used to construct deep ABMs in existing CNNs while reusing pretrained parameters; frame features can be divided into static and dynamic parts because of visual repetition in adjacent frames, which enables temporal modeling to be more efficient. Multiple ABM variants and implementations are investigated, from high performance to high efficiency. Specifically, we show how two-layer subnets in CNNs can be converted to temporal bilinear modules by adding an auxiliary-branch. Besides, we introduce snippet sampling and shifting inference to boost sparse-frame video classification performance. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to show the effectiveness of proposed techniques. Our models can outperform most state-of-the-art methods on Something-Something v1 and v2 datasets without Kinetics pretraining, and are also competitive on other YouTube-like action recognition datasets. Our code is available on https://github.com/zhuxinqimac/abm-pytorch.
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.
Understanding temporal information and how the visual world changes over time is a fundamental ability of intelligent systems. In video understanding, temporal information is at the core of many current challenges, including compression, efficient inference, motion estimation or summarization. However, in current video datasets it has been observed that action classes can often be recognized without any temporal information from a single frame of video. As a result, both benchmarking and training in these datasets may give an unintentional advantage to models with strong image understanding capabilities, as opposed to those with strong temporal understanding. In this paper we address this problem head on by identifying action classes where temporal information is actually necessary to recognize them and call these temporal classes. Selecting temporal classes using a computational method would bias the process. Instead, we propose a methodology based on a simple and effective human annotation experiment. We remove just the temporal information by shuffling frames in time and measure if the action can still be recognized. Classes that cannot be recognized when frames are not in order are included in the temporal Dataset. We observe that this set is statistically different from other static classes, and that performance in it correlates with a networks ability to capture temporal information. Thus we use it as a benchmark on current popular networks, which reveals a series of interesting facts. We also explore the effect of training on the temporal dataset, and observe that this leads to better generalization in unseen classes, demonstrating the need for more temporal data. We hope that the proposed dataset of temporal categories will help guide future research in temporal modeling for better video understanding.
The goal of the emph{alignment problem} is to align a (given) point cloud $P = {p_1,cdots,p_n}$ to another (observed) point cloud $Q = {q_1,cdots,q_n}$. That is, to compute a rotation matrix $R in mathbb{R}^{3 times 3}$ and a translation vector $t in mathbb{R}^{3}$ that minimize the sum of paired distances $sum_{i=1}^n D(Rp_i-t,q_i)$ for some distance function $D$. A harder version is the emph{registration problem}, where the correspondence is unknown, and the minimum is also over all possible correspondence functions from $P$ to $Q$. Heuristics such as the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm and its variants were suggested for these problems, but none yield a provable non-trivial approximation for the global optimum. We prove that there emph{always} exists a witness set of $3$ pairs in $P times Q$ that, via novel alignment algorithm, defines a constant factor approximation (in the worst case) to this global optimum. We then provide algorithms that recover this witness set and yield the first provable constant factor approximation for the: (i) alignment problem in $O(n)$ expected time, and (ii) registration problem in polynomial time. Such small witness sets exist for many variants including points in $d$-dimensional space, outlier-resistant cost functions, and different correspondence types. Extensive experimental results on real and synthetic datasets show that our approximation constants are, in practice, close to $1$, and up to x$10$ times smaller than state-of-the-art algorithms.
Lip-reading aims to recognize speech content from videos via visual analysis of speakers lip movements. This is a challenging task due to the existence of homophemes-words which involve identical or highly similar lip movements, as well as diverse lip appearances and motion patterns among the speakers. To address these challenges, we propose a novel lip-reading model which captures not only the nuance between words but also styles of different speakers, by a multi-grained spatio-temporal modeling of the speaking process. Specifically, we first extract both frame-level fine-grained features and short-term medium-grained features by the visual front-end, which are then combined to obtain discriminative representations for words with similar phonemes. Next, a bidirectional ConvLSTM augmented with temporal attention aggregates spatio-temporal information in the entire input sequence, which is expected to be able to capture the coarse-gained patterns of each word and robust to various conditions in speaker identity, lighting conditions, and so on. By making full use of the information from different levels in a unified framework, the model is not only able to distinguish words with similar pronunciations, but also becomes robust to appearance changes. We evaluate our method on two challenging word-level lip-reading benchmarks and show the effectiveness of the proposed method, which also demonstrate the above claims.
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.