Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression

In this paper, we study the problem of learning Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) for regression. Current architectures of GCNs are limited to the small receptive field of convolution filters and shared transformation matrix for each node. To address these limitations, we propose Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks (SemGCN), a novel neural network architecture that operates on regression tasks with graph-structured data. SemGCN learns to capture semantic information such as local and global node relationships, which is not explicitly represented in the graph. These semantic relationships can be learned through end-to-end training from the ground truth without additional supervision or hand-crafted rules. We further investigate applying SemGCN to 3D human pose regression. Our formulation is intuitive and sufficient since both 2D and 3D human poses can be represented as a structured graph encoding the relationships between joints in the skeleton of a human body. We carry out comprehensive studies to validate our method. The results prove that SemGCN outperforms state of the art while using 90% fewer parameters.Comment: In CVPR 2019 (13 pages including supplementary material). The code can be found at https://github.com/garyzhao/SemGC

Richly Activated Graph Convolutional Network for Action Recognition with Incomplete Skeletons

Current methods for skeleton-based human action recognition usually work with completely observed skeletons. However, in real scenarios, it is prone to capture incomplete and noisy skeletons, which will deteriorate the performance of traditional models. To enhance the robustness of action recognition models to incomplete skeletons, we propose a multi-stream graph convolutional network (GCN) for exploring sufficient discriminative features distributed over all skeleton joints. Here, each stream of the network is only responsible for learning features from currently unactivated joints, which are distinguished by the class activation maps (CAM) obtained by preceding streams, so that the activated joints of the proposed method are obviously more than traditional methods. Thus, the proposed method is termed richly activated GCN (RA-GCN), where the richly discovered features will improve the robustness of the model. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the RA-GCN achieves comparable performance on the NTU RGB+D dataset. Moreover, on a synthetic occlusion dataset, the performance deterioration can be alleviated by the RA-GCN significantly.Comment: Accepted by ICIP 2019, 5 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

What-and-Where to Match: Deep Spatially Multiplicative Integration Networks for Person Re-identification

Matching pedestrians across disjoint camera views, known as person re-identification (re-id), is a challenging problem that is of importance to visual recognition and surveillance. Most existing methods exploit local regions within spatial manipulation to perform matching in local correspondence. However, they essentially extract \emph{fixed} representations from pre-divided regions for each image and perform matching based on the extracted representation subsequently. For models in this pipeline, local finer patterns that are crucial to distinguish positive pairs from negative ones cannot be captured, and thus making them underperformed. In this paper, we propose a novel deep multiplicative integration gating function, which answers the question of \emph{what-and-where to match} for effective person re-id. To address \emph{what} to match, our deep network emphasizes common local patterns by learning joint representations in a multiplicative way. The network comprises two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to extract convolutional activations, and generates relevant descriptors for pedestrian matching. This thus, leads to flexible representations for pair-wise images. To address \emph{where} to match, we combat the spatial misalignment by performing spatially recurrent pooling via a four-directional recurrent neural network to impose spatial dependency over all positions with respect to the entire image. The proposed network is designed to be end-to-end trainable to characterize local pairwise feature interactions in a spatially aligned manner. To demonstrate the superiority of our method, extensive experiments are conducted over three benchmark data sets: VIPeR, CUHK03 and Market-1501.Comment: Published at Pattern Recognition, Elsevie

Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey

Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by this observation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multi-modal tasks and self-supervised learning. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various attention mechanisms in computer vision and categorize them according to approach, such as channel attention, spatial attention, temporal attention and branch attention; a related repository https://github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions is dedicated to collecting related work. We also suggest future directions for attention mechanism research.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure

Topology-aware MLP for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) have achieved remarkable performance in skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing previous GCN-based methods have relied excessively on elaborate human body priors and constructed complex feature aggregation mechanisms, which limits the generalizability of networks. To solve these problems, we propose a novel Spatial Topology Gating Unit (STGU), which is an MLP-based variant without extra priors, to capture the co-occurrence topology features that encode the spatial dependency across all joints. In STGU, to model the sample-specific and completely independent point-wise topology attention, a new gate-based feature interaction mechanism is introduced to activate the features point-to-point by the attention map generated from the input. Based on the STGU, in this work, we propose the first topology-aware MLP-based model, Ta-MLP, for skeleton-based action recognition. In comparison with existing previous methods on three large-scale datasets, Ta-MLP achieves competitive performance. In addition, Ta-MLP reduces the parameters by up to 62.5% with favorable results. Compared with previous state-of-the-art (SOAT) approaches, Ta-MLP pushes the frontier of real-time action recognition. The code will be available at https://github.com/BUPTSJZhang/Ta-MLP.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Two-person Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Interaction Recognition

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been the predominant methods in skeleton-based human action recognition, including human-human interaction recognition. However, when dealing with interaction sequences, current GCN-based methods simply split the two-person skeleton into two discrete graphs and perform graph convolution separately as done for single-person action classification. Such operations ignore rich interactive information and hinder effective spatial inter-body relationship modeling. To overcome the above shortcoming, we introduce a novel unified two-person graph to represent inter-body and intra-body correlations between joints. Experiments show accuracy improvements in recognizing both interactions and individual actions when utilizing the proposed two-person graph topology. In addition, We design several graph labeling strategies to supervise the model to learn discriminant spatial-temporal interactive features. Finally, we propose a two-person graph convolutional network (2P-GCN). Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on four benchmarks of three interaction datasets: SBU, interaction subsets of NTU-RGB+D and NTU-RGB+D 120