Learning Spatiotemporal Features for Infrared Action Recognition with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Infrared (IR) imaging has the potential to enable more robust action recognition systems compared to visible spectrum cameras due to lower sensitivity to lighting conditions and appearance variability. While the action recognition task on videos collected from visible spectrum imaging has received much attention, action recognition in IR videos is significantly less explored. Our objective is to exploit imaging data in this modality for the action recognition task. In this work, we propose a novel two-stream 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture by introducing the discriminative code layer and the corresponding discriminative code loss function. The proposed network processes IR image and the IR-based optical flow field sequences. We pretrain the 3D CNN model on the visible spectrum Sports-1M action dataset and finetune it on the Infrared Action Recognition (InfAR) dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first application of the 3D CNN to action recognition in the IR domain. We conduct an elaborate analysis of different fusion schemes (weighted average, single and double-layer neural nets) applied to different 3D CNN outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art average precision (AP) performances on the InfAR dataset: (1) the proposed two-stream 3D CNN achieves the best reported 77.5% AP, and (2) our 3D CNN model applied to the optical flow fields achieves the best reported single stream 75.42% AP

Cross-Modal Message Passing for Two-stream Fusion

Processing and fusing information among multi-modal is a very useful technique for achieving high performance in many computer vision problems. In order to tackle multi-modal information more effectively, we introduce a novel framework for multi-modal fusion: Cross-modal Message Passing (CMMP). Specifically, we propose a cross-modal message passing mechanism to fuse two-stream network for action recognition, which composes of an appearance modal network (RGB image) and a motion modal (optical flow image) network. The objectives of individual networks in this framework are two-fold: a standard classification objective and a competing objective. The classification object ensures that each modal network predicts the true action category while the competing objective encourages each modal network to outperform the other one. We quantitatively show that the proposed CMMP fuses the traditional two-stream network more effectively, and outperforms all existing two-stream fusion method on UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets.Comment: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processin

End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Activity Detection with Bimodal Recurrent Neural Models

Speech activity detection (SAD) plays an important role in current speech processing systems, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). SAD is particularly difficult in environments with acoustic noise. A practical solution is to incorporate visual information, increasing the robustness of the SAD approach. An audiovisual system has the advantage of being robust to different speech modes (e.g., whisper speech) or background noise. Recent advances in audiovisual speech processing using deep learning have opened opportunities to capture in a principled way the temporal relationships between acoustic and visual features. This study explores this idea proposing a \emph{bimodal recurrent neural network} (BRNN) framework for SAD. The approach models the temporal dynamic of the sequential audiovisual data, improving the accuracy and robustness of the proposed SAD system. Instead of estimating hand-crafted features, the study investigates an end-to-end training approach, where acoustic and visual features are directly learned from the raw data during training. The experimental evaluation considers a large audiovisual corpus with over 60.8 hours of recordings, collected from 105 speakers. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to absolute improvements up to 1.2% under practical scenarios over a VAD baseline using only audio implemented with deep neural network (DNN). The proposed approach achieves 92.7% F1-score when it is evaluated using the sensors from a portable tablet under noisy acoustic environment, which is only 1.0% lower than the performance obtained under ideal conditions (e.g., clean speech obtained with a high definition camera and a close-talking microphone).Comment: Submitted to Speech Communicatio