Graph Distillation for Action Detection with Privileged Modalities

We propose a technique that tackles action detection in multimodal videos under a realistic and challenging condition in which only limited training data and partially observed modalities are available. Common methods in transfer learning do not take advantage of the extra modalities potentially available in the source domain. On the other hand, previous work on multimodal learning only focuses on a single domain or task and does not handle the modality discrepancy between training and testing. In this work, we propose a method termed graph distillation that incorporates rich privileged information from a large-scale multimodal dataset in the source domain, and improves the learning in the target domain where training data and modalities are scarce. We evaluate our approach on action classification and detection tasks in multimodal videos, and show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the NTU RGB+D and PKU-MMD benchmarks. The code is released at http://alan.vision/eccv18_graph/.Comment: ECCV 201

Pseudo-labels for Supervised Learning on Dynamic Vision Sensor Data, Applied to Object Detection under Ego-motion

In recent years, dynamic vision sensors (DVS), also known as event-based cameras or neuromorphic sensors, have seen increased use due to various advantages over conventional frame-based cameras. Using principles inspired by the retina, its high temporal resolution overcomes motion blurring, its high dynamic range overcomes extreme illumination conditions and its low power consumption makes it ideal for embedded systems on platforms such as drones and self-driving cars. However, event-based data sets are scarce and labels are even rarer for tasks such as object detection. We transferred discriminative knowledge from a state-of-the-art frame-based convolutional neural network (CNN) to the event-based modality via intermediate pseudo-labels, which are used as targets for supervised learning. We show, for the first time, event-based car detection under ego-motion in a real environment at 100 frames per second with a test average precision of 40.3% relative to our annotated ground truth. The event-based car detector handles motion blur and poor illumination conditions despite not explicitly trained to do so, and even complements frame-based CNN detectors, suggesting that it has learnt generalized visual representations

I2^2MD: 3D Action Representation Learning with Inter- and Intra-modal Mutual Distillation

Recent progresses on self-supervised 3D human action representation learning are largely attributed to contrastive learning. However, in conventional contrastive frameworks, the rich complementarity between different skeleton modalities remains under-explored. Moreover, optimized with distinguishing self-augmented samples, models struggle with numerous similar positive instances in the case of limited action categories. In this work, we tackle the aforementioned problems by introducing a general Inter- and Intra-modal Mutual Distillation (I$^2$MD) framework. In I$^2$MD, we first re-formulate the cross-modal interaction as a Cross-modal Mutual Distillation (CMD) process. Different from existing distillation solutions that transfer the knowledge of a pre-trained and fixed teacher to the student, in CMD, the knowledge is continuously updated and bidirectionally distilled between modalities during pre-training. To alleviate the interference of similar samples and exploit their underlying contexts, we further design the Intra-modal Mutual Distillation (IMD) strategy, In IMD, the Dynamic Neighbors Aggregation (DNA) mechanism is first introduced, where an additional cluster-level discrimination branch is instantiated in each modality. It adaptively aggregates highly-correlated neighboring features, forming local cluster-level contrasting. Mutual distillation is then performed between the two branches for cross-level knowledge exchange. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our approach sets a series of new records.Comment: submitted to IJCV. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2208.1244

Cross Modal Distillation for Supervision Transfer

In this work we propose a technique that transfers supervision between images from different modalities. We use learned representations from a large labeled modality as a supervisory signal for training representations for a new unlabeled paired modality. Our method enables learning of rich representations for unlabeled modalities and can be used as a pre-training procedure for new modalities with limited labeled data. We show experimental results where we transfer supervision from labeled RGB images to unlabeled depth and optical flow images and demonstrate large improvements for both these cross modal supervision transfers. Code, data and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/s-gupta/fast-rcnn/tree/distillationComment: Updated version (v2) contains additional experiments and result

XKD: Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation with Domain Alignment for Video Representation Learning

We present XKD, a novel self-supervised framework to learn meaningful representations from unlabelled video clips. XKD is trained with two pseudo tasks. First, masked data reconstruction is performed to learn individual representations from audio and visual streams. Next, self-supervised cross-modal knowledge distillation is performed between the two modalities through teacher-student setups to learn complementary information. To identify the most effective information to transfer and also to tackle the domain gap between audio and visual modalities which could hinder knowledge transfer, we introduce a domain alignment and feature refinement strategy for effective cross-modal knowledge distillation. Lastly, to develop a general-purpose network capable of handling both audio and visual streams, modality-agnostic variants of our proposed framework are introduced, which use the same backbone for both audio and visual modalities. Our proposed cross-modal knowledge distillation improves linear evaluation top-1 accuracy of video action classification by 8.6% on UCF101, 8.2% on HMDB51, 13.9% on Kinetics-Sound, and 15.7% on Kinetics400. Additionally, our modality-agnostic variant shows promising results in developing a general-purpose network capable of learning both data streams for solving different downstream tasks

Feature-Supervised Action Modality Transfer

This paper strives for action recognition and detection in video modalities like RGB, depth maps or 3D-skeleton sequences when only limited modality-specific labeled examples are available. For the RGB, and derived optical-flow, modality many large-scale labeled datasets have been made available. They have become the de facto pre-training choice when recognizing or detecting new actions from RGB datasets that have limited amounts of labeled examples available. Unfortunately, large-scale labeled action datasets for other modalities are unavailable for pre-training. In this paper, our goal is to recognize actions from limited examples in non-RGB video modalities, by learning from large-scale labeled RGB data. To this end, we propose a two-step training process: (i) we extract action representation knowledge from an RGB-trained teacher network and adapt it to a non-RGB student network. (ii) we then fine-tune the transfer model with available labeled examples of the target modality. For the knowledge transfer we introduce feature-supervision strategies, which rely on unlabeled pairs of two modalities (the RGB and the target modality) to transfer feature level representations from the teacher to the student network. Ablations and generalizations with two RGB source datasets and two non-RGB target datasets demonstrate that an optical-flow teacher provides better action transfer features than RGB for both depth maps and 3D-skeletons, even when evaluated on a different target domain, or for a different task. Compared to alternative cross-modal action transfer methods we show a good improvement in performance especially when labeled non-RGB examples to learn from are scarce

Physical-aware Cross-modal Adversarial Network for Wearable Sensor-based Human Action Recognition

Wearable sensor-based Human Action Recognition (HAR) has made significant strides in recent times. However, the accuracy performance of wearable sensor-based HAR is currently still lagging behind that of visual modalities-based systems, such as RGB video and depth data. Although diverse input modalities can provide complementary cues and improve the accuracy performance of HAR, wearable devices can only capture limited kinds of non-visual time series input, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. This limitation hinders the deployment of multimodal simultaneously using visual and non-visual modality data in parallel on current wearable devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel Physical-aware Cross-modal Adversarial (PCA) framework that utilizes only time-series accelerometer data from four inertial sensors for the wearable sensor-based HAR problem. Specifically, we propose an effective IMU2SKELETON network to produce corresponding synthetic skeleton joints from accelerometer data. Subsequently, we imposed additional constraints on the synthetic skeleton data from a physical perspective, as accelerometer data can be regarded as the second derivative of the skeleton sequence coordinates. After that, the original accelerometer as well as the constrained skeleton sequence were fused together to make the final classification. In this way, when individuals wear wearable devices, the devices can not only capture accelerometer data, but can also generate synthetic skeleton sequences for real-time wearable sensor-based HAR applications that need to be conducted anytime and anywhere. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PCA framework, we conduct extensive experiments on Berkeley-MHAD, UTD-MHAD, and MMAct datasets. The results confirm that the proposed PCA approach has competitive performance compared to the previous methods on the mono sensor-based HAR classification problem.Comment: First IMU2SKELETON GANs approach for wearable HAR problem. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.0809