13 research outputs found
Localizing Actions from Video Labels and Pseudo-Annotations
The goal of this paper is to determine the spatio-temporal location of
actions in video. Where training from hard to obtain box annotations is the
norm, we propose an intuitive and effective algorithm that localizes actions
from their class label only. We are inspired by recent work showing that
unsupervised action proposals selected with human point-supervision perform as
well as using expensive box annotations. Rather than asking users to provide
point supervision, we propose fully automatic visual cues that replace manual
point annotations. We call the cues pseudo-annotations, introduce five of them,
and propose a correlation metric for automatically selecting and combining
them. Thorough evaluation on challenging action localization datasets shows
that we reach results comparable to results with full box supervision. We also
show that pseudo-annotations can be leveraged during testing to improve weakly-
and strongly-supervised localizers.Comment: BMV
CDC: Convolutional-De-Convolutional Networks for Precise Temporal Action Localization in Untrimmed Videos
Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging problem. Given a
long, untrimmed video consisting of multiple action instances and complex
background contents, we need not only to recognize their action categories, but
also to localize the start time and end time of each instance. Many
state-of-the-art systems use segment-level classifiers to select and rank
proposal segments of pre-determined boundaries. However, a desirable model
should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine
granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. To this end, we
design a novel Convolutional-De-Convolutional (CDC) network that places CDC
filters on top of 3D ConvNets, which have been shown to be effective for
abstracting action semantics but reduce the temporal length of the input data.
The proposed CDC filter performs the required temporal upsampling and spatial
downsampling operations simultaneously to predict actions at the frame-level
granularity. It is unique in jointly modeling action semantics in space-time
and fine-grained temporal dynamics. We train the CDC network in an end-to-end
manner efficiently. Our model not only achieves superior performance in
detecting actions in every frame, but also significantly boosts the precision
of localizing temporal boundaries. Finally, the CDC network demonstrates a very
high efficiency with the ability to process 500 frames per second on a single
GPU server. We will update the camera-ready version and publish the source
codes online soon.Comment: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),
201
Actor and Action Video Segmentation from a Sentence
This paper strives for pixel-level segmentation of actors and their actions
in video content. Different from existing works, which all learn to segment
from a fixed vocabulary of actor and action pairs, we infer the segmentation
from a natural language input sentence. This allows to distinguish between
fine-grained actors in the same super-category, identify actor and action
instances, and segment pairs that are outside of the actor and action
vocabulary. We propose a fully-convolutional model for pixel-level actor and
action segmentation using an encoder-decoder architecture optimized for video.
To show the potential of actor and action video segmentation from a sentence,
we extend two popular actor and action datasets with more than 7,500 natural
language descriptions. Experiments demonstrate the quality of the
sentence-guided segmentations, the generalization ability of our model, and its
advantage for traditional actor and action segmentation compared to the
state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018 as ora
Scale-Adaptive Video Understanding.
The recent rise of large-scale, diverse video data has urged a new era of high-level video understanding. It is increasingly critical for intelligent systems to extract semantics from videos. In this dissertation, we explore the use of supervoxel hierarchies as a type of video representation for high-level video understanding. The supervoxel hierarchies contain rich multiscale decompositions of video content, where various structures can be found at various levels. However, no single level of scale contains all the desired structures we need. It is essential to adaptively choose the scales for subsequent video analysis. Thus, we present a set of tools to manipulate scales in supervoxel hierarchies including both scale generation and scale selection methods.
In our scale generation work, we evaluate a set of seven supervoxel methods in the context of what we consider to be a good supervoxel for video representation. We address a key limitation that has traditionally prevented supervoxel scale generation on long videos. We do so by proposing an approximation framework for streaming hierarchical scale generation that is able to generate multiscale decompositions for arbitrarily-long videos using constant memory.
Subsequently, we present two scale selection methods that are able to adaptively choose the scales according to application needs. The first method flattens the entire supervoxel hierarchy into a single segmentation that overcomes the limitation induced by trivial selection of a single scale. We show that the selection can be driven by various post hoc feature criteria. The second scale selection method combines the supervoxel hierarchy with a conditional random field for the task of labeling actors and actions in videos. We formulate the scale selection problem and the video labeling problem in a joint framework. Experiments on a novel large-scale video dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the explicit consideration of scale selection in video understanding.
Aside from the computational methods, we present a visual psychophysical study to quantify how well the actor and action semantics in high-level video understanding are retained in supervoxel hierarchies. The ultimate findings suggest that some semantics are well-retained in the supervoxel hierarchies and can be used for further video analysis.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133202/1/cliangxu_1.pd