360 research outputs found
Segmental Spatiotemporal CNNs for Fine-grained Action Segmentation
Joint segmentation and classification of fine-grained actions is important
for applications of human-robot interaction, video surveillance, and human
skill evaluation. However, despite substantial recent progress in large-scale
action classification, the performance of state-of-the-art fine-grained action
recognition approaches remains low. We propose a model for action segmentation
which combines low-level spatiotemporal features with a high-level segmental
classifier. Our spatiotemporal CNN is comprised of a spatial component that
uses convolutional filters to capture information about objects and their
relationships, and a temporal component that uses large 1D convolutional
filters to capture information about how object relationships change across
time. These features are used in tandem with a semi-Markov model that models
transitions from one action to another. We introduce an efficient constrained
segmental inference algorithm for this model that is orders of magnitude faster
than the current approach. We highlight the effectiveness of our Segmental
Spatiotemporal CNN on cooking and surgical action datasets for which we observe
substantially improved performance relative to recent baseline methods.Comment: Updated from the ECCV 2016 version. We fixed an important
mathematical error and made the section on segmental inference cleare
End-to-end neural segmental models for speech recognition
Segmental models are an alternative to frame-based models for sequence
prediction, where hypothesized path weights are based on entire segment scores
rather than a single frame at a time. Neural segmental models are segmental
models that use neural network-based weight functions. Neural segmental models
have achieved competitive results for speech recognition, and their end-to-end
training has been explored in several studies. In this work, we review neural
segmental models, which can be viewed as consisting of a neural network-based
acoustic encoder and a finite-state transducer decoder. We study end-to-end
segmental models with different weight functions, including ones based on
frame-level neural classifiers and on segmental recurrent neural networks. We
study how reducing the search space size impacts performance under different
weight functions. We also compare several loss functions for end-to-end
training. Finally, we explore training approaches, including multi-stage vs.
end-to-end training and multitask training that combines segmental and
frame-level losses
Towards End-to-End Speech Recognition
Standard automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems follow a divide and conquer approach to convert speech into text. Alternately, the end goal is achieved by a combination of sub-tasks, namely, feature extraction, acoustic modeling and sequence decoding, which are optimized in an independent manner. More recently, in the machine learning community deep learning approaches have emerged which allow training of systems in an end-to-end manner. Such approaches have found success in the area of natural language processing and computer vision community, and have consequently peaked interest in the speech community. The present thesis builds on these recent advances to investigate approaches to develop speech recognition systems in end-to-end manner. In that respect, the thesis follows two main axes of research. The first axis of research focuses on joint learning of features and classifiers for acoustic modeling. The second axis of research focuses on joint modeling of the acoustic model and the decoder. Along the first axis of research, in the framework of hybrid hidden Markov model/artificial neural networks (HMM/ANN) based ASR, we develop a convolution neural networks (CNNs) based acoustic modeling approach that takes raw speech signal as input and estimates phone class conditional probabilities. Specifically, the CNN has several convolution layers (feature stage) followed by multilayer perceptron (classifier stage), which are jointly optimized during the training. Through ASR studies on multiple languages and extensive analysis of the approach, we show that the proposed approach, with minimal prior knowledge, is able to learn automatically the relevant features from the raw speech signal. This approach yields systems that have less number of parameters and achieves better performance, when compared to the conventional approach of cepstral feature extraction followed by classifier training. As the features are automatically learned from the signal, a natural question that arises is: are such systems robust to noise? Towards that we propose a robust CNN approach referred to as normalized CNN approach, which yields systems that are as robust as or better than the conventional ASR systems using cepstral features (with feature level normalizations). The second axis of research focuses on end-to-end sequence-to-sequence conversion. We first propose an end-to-end phoneme recognition system. In this system the relevant features, classifier and the decoder (based on conditional random fields) are jointly modeled during training. We demonstrate the viability of the approach on TIMIT phoneme recognition task. Building on top of that, we investigate a ``weakly supervised'' training that alleviates the necessity for frame level alignments. Finally, we extend the weakly supervised approach to propose a novel keyword spotting technique. In this technique, a CNN first process the input observation sequence to output word level scores, which are subsequently aggregated to detect or spot words. We demonstrate the potential of the approach through a comparative study on LibriSpeech with the standard approach of keyword word spotting based on lattice indexing using ASR system
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