BRACE: The Breakdancing Competition Dataset for Dance Motion Synthesis

Generative models for audio-conditioned dance motion synthesis map music features to dance movements. Models are trained to associate motion patterns to audio patterns, usually without an explicit knowledge of the human body. This approach relies on a few assumptions: strong music-dance correlation, controlled motion data and relatively simple poses and movements. These characteristics are found in all existing datasets for dance motion synthesis, and indeed recent methods can achieve good results.We introduce a new dataset aiming to challenge these common assumptions, compiling a set of dynamic dance sequences displaying complex human poses. We focus on breakdancing which features acrobatic moves and tangled postures. We source our data from the Red Bull BC One competition videos. Estimating human keypoints from these videos is difficult due to the complexity of the dance, as well as the multiple moving cameras recording setup. We adopt a hybrid labelling pipeline leveraging deep estimation models as well as manual annotations to obtain good quality keypoint sequences at a reduced cost. Our efforts produced the BRACE dataset, which contains over 3 hours and 30 minutes of densely annotated poses. We test state-of-the-art methods on BRACE, showing their limitations when evaluated on complex sequences. Our dataset can readily foster advance in dance motion synthesis. With intricate poses and swift movements, models are forced to go beyond learning a mapping between modalities and reason more effectively about body structure and movements.Comment: ECCV 2022. Dataset available at https://github.com/dmoltisanti/brac

AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions

This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2018. Check dataset page https://research.google.com/ava/ for detail

Audio-Visual Embedding for Cross-Modal MusicVideo Retrieval through Supervised Deep CCA

Deep learning has successfully shown excellent performance in learning joint representations between different data modalities. Unfortunately, little research focuses on cross-modal correlation learning where temporal structures of different data modalities, such as audio and video, should be taken into account. Music video retrieval by given musical audio is a natural way to search and interact with music contents. In this work, we study cross-modal music video retrieval in terms of emotion similarity. Particularly, audio of an arbitrary length is used to retrieve a longer or full-length music video. To this end, we propose a novel audio-visual embedding algorithm by Supervised Deep CanonicalCorrelation Analysis (S-DCCA) that projects audio and video into a shared space to bridge the semantic gap between audio and video. This also preserves the similarity between audio and visual contents from different videos with the same class label and the temporal structure. The contribution of our approach is mainly manifested in the two aspects: i) We propose to select top k audio chunks by attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)model, which can represent good audio summarization with local properties. ii) We propose an end-to-end deep model for cross-modal audio-visual learning where S-DCCA is trained to learn the semantic correlation between audio and visual modalities. Due to the lack of music video dataset, we construct 10K music video dataset from YouTube 8M dataset. Some promising results such as MAP and precision-recall show that our proposed model can be applied to music video retrieval.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Accepted by ISM 201