FPGA Implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks with Fixed-Point Calculations

Neural network-based methods for image processing are becoming widely used in practical applications. Modern neural networks are computationally expensive and require specialized hardware, such as graphics processing units. Since such hardware is not always available in real life applications, there is a compelling need for the design of neural networks for mobile devices. Mobile neural networks typically have reduced number of parameters and require a relatively small number of arithmetic operations. However, they usually still are executed at the software level and use floating-point calculations. The use of mobile networks without further optimization may not provide sufficient performance when high processing speed is required, for example, in real-time video processing (30 frames per second). In this study, we suggest optimizations to speed up computations in order to efficiently use already trained neural networks on a mobile device. Specifically, we propose an approach for speeding up neural networks by moving computation from software to hardware and by using fixed-point calculations instead of floating-point. We propose a number of methods for neural network architecture design to improve the performance with fixed-point calculations. We also show an example of how existing datasets can be modified and adapted for the recognition task in hand. Finally, we present the design and the implementation of a floating-point gate array-based device to solve the practical problem of real-time handwritten digit classification from mobile camera video feed

Deep learning for domain-specific action recognition in tennis

Recent progress in sports analytics has been driven by the availability of spatio-temporal and high level data. Video-based action recognition in sports can significantly contribute to these advances. Good progress has been made in the field of action recognition but its application to sports mainly focuses in detecting which sport is being played. In order for action recognition to be useful in sports analytics a finer-grained action classification is needed. For this reason we focus on the fine-grained action recognition in tennis and explore the capabilities of deep neural networks for this task. In our model, videos are represented as sequences of features, extracted using the well-known Inception neural network, trained on an independent dataset. Then a 3-layered LSTM network is trained for the classification. Our main contribution is the proposed neural network architecture that achieves competitive results in the challenging THETIS dataset, comprising videos of tennis actions

A Fuzzy Logic-Based System for Soccer Video Scenes Classification

Massive global video surveillance worldwide captures data but lacks detailed activity information to flag events of interest, while the human burden of monitoring video footage is untenable. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to raw video footage to identify and extract required information and summarize it in linguistic formats. Video summarization automation usually involves text-based data such as subtitles, segmenting text and semantics, with little attention to video summarization in the processing of video footage only. Classification problems in recorded videos are often very complex and uncertain due to the dynamic nature of the video sequence and light conditions, background, camera angle, occlusions, indistinguishable scene features, etc. Video scene classification forms the basis of linguistic video summarization, an open research problem with major commercial importance. Soccer video scenes present added challenges due to specific objects and events with similar features (e.g. “people” include audiences, coaches, and players), as well as being constituted from a series of quickly changing and dynamic frames with small inter-frame variations. There is an added difficulty associated with the need to have light weight video classification systems working in real time with massive data sizes. In this thesis, we introduce a novel system based on Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Classification Systems (IT2FLCS) whose parameters are optimized by the Big Bang–Big Crunch (BB-BC) algorithm, which allows for the automatic scenes classification using optimized rules in broadcasted soccer matches video. The type-2 fuzzy logic systems would be unequivocal to present a highly interpretable and transparent model which is very suitable for the handling the encountered uncertainties in video footages and converting the accumulated data to linguistic formats which can be easily stored and analysed. Meanwhile the traditional black box techniques, such as support vector machines (SVMs) and neural networks, do not provide models which could be easily analysed and understood by human users. The BB-BC optimization is a heuristic, population-based evolutionary approach which is characterized by the ease of implementation, fast convergence and low computational cost. We employed the BB-BC to optimize our system parameters of fuzzy logic membership functions and fuzzy rules. Using the BB-BC we are able to balance the system transparency (through generating a small rule set) together with increasing the accuracy of scene classification. Thus, the proposed fuzzy-based system allows achieving relatively high classification accuracy with a small number of rules thus increasing the system interpretability and allowing its real-time processing. The type-2 Fuzzy Logic Classification System (T2FLCS) obtained 87.57% prediction accuracy in the scene classification of our testing group data which is better than the type-1 fuzzy classification system and neural networks counterparts. The BB-BC optimization algorithms decrease the size of rule bases both in T1FLCS and T2FLCS; the T2FLCS finally got 85.716% with reduce rules, outperforming the T1FLCS and neural network counterparts, especially in the “out-of-range data” which validates the T2FLCSs capability to handle the high level of faced uncertainties. We also presented a novel approach based on the scenes classification system combined with the dynamic time warping algorithm to implement the video events detection for real world processing. The proposed system could run on recorded or live video clips and output a label to describe the event in order to provide the high level summarization of the videos to the user

Object detection in videos using principal component pursuit and convolutional neural networks

Object recognition in videos is one of the main challenges in computer vision. Several methods have been proposed to achieve this task, such as background subtraction, temporal differencing, optical flow, particle filtering among others. Since the introduction of Convolutonal Neural Networks (CNN) for object detection in the Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC), its use for image detection and classification has increased, becoming the state-of-the-art for such task, being Faster R-CNN the preferred model in the latest ILSVRC challenges. Moreover, the Faster R-CNN model, with minimum modifications, has been succesfully used to detect and classify objects (either static or dynamic) in video sequences; in such setup, the frames of the video are input “as is” i.e. without any pre-processing. In this thesis work we propose to use Robust PCA (RPCA, a.k.a. Principal Component Pursuit, PCP), as a video background modeling pre-processing step, before using the Faster R-CNN model, in order to improve the overall performance of detection and classification of, specifically, the moving objects. We hypothesize that such pre-processing step, which segments the moving objects from the background, would reduce the amount of regions to be analyzed in a given frame and thus (i) improve the classification time and (ii) reduce the error in classification for the dynamic objects present in the video. In particular, we use a fully incremental RPCA / PCP algorithm that is suitable for real-time or on-line processing. Furthermore, we present extensive computational results that were carried out in three different platforms: A high-end server with a Tesla K40m GPU, a desktop with a Tesla K10m GPU and the embedded system Jetson TK1. Our classification results attain competitive or superior performance in terms of Fmeasure, achieving an improvement ranging from 3.7% to 97.2%, with a mean improvement of 22% when the sparse image was used to detect and classify the object with the neural network, while at the same time, reducing the classification time in all architectures by a factor raging between 2% and 25%.Tesi

Beyond Short Snippets: Deep Networks for Video Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been extensively applied for image recognition problems giving state-of-the-art results on recognition, detection, segmentation and retrieval. In this work we propose and evaluate several deep neural network architectures to combine image information across a video over longer time periods than previously attempted. We propose two methods capable of handling full length videos. The first method explores various convolutional temporal feature pooling architectures, examining the various design choices which need to be made when adapting a CNN for this task. The second proposed method explicitly models the video as an ordered sequence of frames. For this purpose we employ a recurrent neural network that uses Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells which are connected to the output of the underlying CNN. Our best networks exhibit significant performance improvements over previously published results on the Sports 1 million dataset (73.1% vs. 60.9%) and the UCF-101 datasets with (88.6% vs. 88.0%) and without additional optical flow information (82.6% vs. 72.8%)