Self-supervised Temporal Discriminative Learning for Video Representation Learning

Temporal cues in videos provide important information for recognizing actions accurately. However, temporal-discriminative features can hardly be extracted without using an annotated large-scale video action dataset for training. This paper proposes a novel Video-based Temporal-Discriminative Learning (VTDL) framework in self-supervised manner. Without labelled data for network pretraining, temporal triplet is generated for each anchor video by using segment of the same or different time interval so as to enhance the capacity for temporal feature representation. Measuring temporal information by time derivative, Temporal Consistent Augmentation (TCA) is designed to ensure that the time derivative (in any order) of the augmented positive is invariant except for a scaling constant. Finally, temporal-discriminative features are learnt by minimizing the distance between each anchor and its augmented positive, while the distance between each anchor and its augmented negative as well as other videos saved in the memory bank is maximized to enrich the representation diversity. In the downstream action recognition task, the proposed method significantly outperforms existing related works. Surprisingly, the proposed self-supervised approach is better than fully-supervised methods on UCF101 and HMDB51 when a small-scale video dataset (with only thousands of videos) is used for pre-training. The code has been made publicly available on https://github.com/FingerRec/Self-Supervised-Temporal-Discriminative-Representation-Learning-for-Video-Action-Recognition.

Self-supervised learning using consistency regularization of spatio-temporal data augmentation for action recognition

Self-supervised learning has shown great potentials in improving the deep learning model in an unsupervised manner by constructing surrogate supervision signals directly from the unlabeled data. Different from existing works, we present a novel way to obtain the surrogate supervision signal based on high-level feature maps under consistency regularization. In this paper, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Consistency Regularization between different output features generated from a siamese network including a clean path fed with original video and a noise path fed with the corresponding augmented video. Based on the Spatio-Temporal characteristics of video, we develop two video-based data augmentation methods, i.e., Spatio-Temporal Transformation and Intra-Video Mixup. Consistency of the former one is proposed to model transformation consistency of features, while the latter one aims at retaining spatial invariance to extract action-related features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements compared with state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods for action recognition. When using our method as an additional regularization term and combine with current surrogate supervision signals, we achieve 22% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art on HMDB51 and 7% on UCF101.