182,790 research outputs found
Persistent Homology of Attractors For Action Recognition
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for dynamical analysis of human
actions from 3D motion capture data using topological data analysis. We model
human actions using the topological features of the attractor of the dynamical
system. We reconstruct the phase-space of time series corresponding to actions
using time-delay embedding, and compute the persistent homology of the
phase-space reconstruction. In order to better represent the topological
properties of the phase-space, we incorporate the temporal adjacency
information when computing the homology groups. The persistence of these
homology groups encoded using persistence diagrams are used as features for the
actions. Our experiments with action recognition using these features
demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other baseline methods.Comment: 5 pages, Under review in International Conference on Image Processin
Multi-Label Zero-Shot Human Action Recognition via Joint Latent Ranking Embedding
Human action recognition refers to automatic recognizing human actions from a
video clip. In reality, there often exist multiple human actions in a video
stream. Such a video stream is often weakly-annotated with a set of relevant
human action labels at a global level rather than assigning each label to a
specific video episode corresponding to a single action, which leads to a
multi-label learning problem. Furthermore, there are many meaningful human
actions in reality but it would be extremely difficult to collect/annotate
video clips regarding all of various human actions, which leads to a zero-shot
learning scenario. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that has
addressed all the above issues together in human action recognition. In this
paper, we formulate a real-world human action recognition task as a multi-label
zero-shot learning problem and propose a framework to tackle this problem in a
holistic way. Our framework holistically tackles the issue of unknown temporal
boundaries between different actions for multi-label learning and exploits the
side information regarding the semantic relationship between different human
actions for knowledge transfer. Consequently, our framework leads to a joint
latent ranking embedding for multi-label zero-shot human action recognition. A
novel neural architecture of two component models and an alternate learning
algorithm are proposed to carry out the joint latent ranking embedding
learning. Thus, multi-label zero-shot recognition is done by measuring
relatedness scores of action labels to a test video clip in the joint latent
visual and semantic embedding spaces. We evaluate our framework with different
settings, including a novel data split scheme designed especially for
evaluating multi-label zero-shot learning, on two datasets: Breakfast and
Charades. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our
framework.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures and 7 tables. Technical report submitted to a
journal. More experimental results/references were added and typos were
correcte
Memory-Augmented Temporal Dynamic Learning for Action Recognition
Human actions captured in video sequences contain two crucial factors for
action recognition, i.e., visual appearance and motion dynamics. To model these
two aspects, Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks (CNNs and RNNs) are
adopted in most existing successful methods for recognizing actions. However,
CNN based methods are limited in modeling long-term motion dynamics. RNNs are
able to learn temporal motion dynamics but lack effective ways to tackle
unsteady dynamics in long-duration motion. In this work, we propose a
memory-augmented temporal dynamic learning network, which learns to write the
most evident information into an external memory module and ignore irrelevant
ones. In particular, we present a differential memory controller to make a
discrete decision on whether the external memory module should be updated with
current feature. The discrete memory controller takes in the memory history,
context embedding and current feature as inputs and controls information flow
into the external memory module. Additionally, we train this discrete memory
controller using straight-through estimator. We evaluate this end-to-end system
on benchmark datasets (UCF101 and HMDB51) of human action recognition. The
experimental results show consistent improvements on both datasets over prior
works and our baselines.Comment: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19
SwingBot: Learning Physical Features from In-hand Tactile Exploration for Dynamic Swing-up Manipulation
Several robot manipulation tasks are extremely sensitive to variations of the
physical properties of the manipulated objects. One such task is manipulating
objects by using gravity or arm accelerations, increasing the importance of
mass, center of mass, and friction information. We present SwingBot, a robot
that is able to learn the physical features of a held object through tactile
exploration. Two exploration actions (tilting and shaking) provide the tactile
information used to create a physical feature embedding space. With this
embedding, SwingBot is able to predict the swing angle achieved by a robot
performing dynamic swing-up manipulations on a previously unseen object. Using
these predictions, it is able to search for the optimal control parameters for
a desired swing-up angle. We show that with the learned physical features our
end-to-end self-supervised learning pipeline is able to substantially improve
the accuracy of swinging up unseen objects. We also show that objects with
similar dynamics are closer to each other on the embedding space and that the
embedding can be disentangled into values of specific physical properties.Comment: IROS 202
REPRESENTATION LEARNING FOR ACTION RECOGNITION
The objective of this research work is to develop discriminative representations for human
actions. The motivation stems from the fact that there are many issues encountered while
capturing actions in videos like intra-action variations (due to actors, viewpoints, and duration),
inter-action similarity, background motion, and occlusion of actors. Hence, obtaining
a representation which can address all the variations in the same action while maintaining
discrimination with other actions is a challenging task. In literature, actions have been represented
either using either low-level or high-level features. Low-level features describe
the motion and appearance in small spatio-temporal volumes extracted from a video. Due
to the limited space-time volume used for extracting low-level features, they are not able
to account for viewpoint and actor variations or variable length actions. On the other hand,
high-level features handle variations in actors, viewpoints, and duration but the resulting
representation is often high-dimensional which introduces the curse of dimensionality. In
this thesis, we propose new representations for describing actions by combining the advantages
of both low-level and high-level features. Specifically, we investigate various linear
and non-linear decomposition techniques to extract meaningful attributes in both high-level
and low-level features. In the first approach, the sparsity of high-level feature descriptors is leveraged to build
action-specific dictionaries. Each dictionary retains only the discriminative information
for a particular action and hence reduces inter-action similarity. Then, a sparsity-based
classification method is proposed to classify the low-rank representation of clips obtained
using these dictionaries. We show that this representation based on dictionary learning improves
the classification performance across actions. Also, a few of the actions consist of
rapid body deformations that hinder the extraction of local features from body movements.
Hence, we propose to use a dictionary which is trained on convolutional neural network
(CNN) features of the human body in various poses to reliably identify actors from the
background. Particularly, we demonstrate the efficacy of sparse representation in the identification
of the human body under rapid and substantial deformation.
In the first two approaches, sparsity-based representation is developed to improve discriminability
using class-specific dictionaries that utilize action labels. However, developing
an unsupervised representation of actions is more beneficial as it can be used to both
recognize similar actions and localize actions. We propose to exploit inter-action similarity
to train a universal attribute model (UAM) in order to learn action attributes (common and
distinct) implicitly across all the actions. Using maximum aposteriori (MAP) adaptation,
a high-dimensional super action-vector (SAV) for each clip is extracted. As this SAV contains
redundant attributes of all other actions, we use factor analysis to extract a novel lowvi
dimensional action-vector representation for each clip. Action-vectors are shown to suppress
background motion and highlight actions of interest in both trimmed and untrimmed
clips that contributes to action recognition without the help of any classifiers.
It is observed during our experiments that action-vector cannot effectively discriminate
between actions which are visually similar to each other. Hence, we subject action-vectors
to supervised linear embedding using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and probabilistic
LDA (PLDA) to enforce discrimination. Particularly, we show that leveraging complimentary
information across action-vectors using different local features followed by discriminative
embedding provides the best classification performance. Further, we explore
non-linear embedding of action-vectors using Siamese networks especially for fine-grained
action recognition. A visualization of the hidden layer output in Siamese networks shows
its ability to effectively separate visually similar actions. This leads to better classification
performance than linear embedding on fine-grained action recognition.
All of the above approaches are presented on large unconstrained datasets with hundreds
of examples per action. However, actions in surveillance videos like snatch thefts are
difficult to model because of the diverse variety of scenarios in which they occur and very
few labeled examples. Hence, we propose to utilize the universal attribute model (UAM)
trained on large action datasets to represent such actions. Specifically, we show that there
are similarities between certain actions in the large datasets with snatch thefts which help
in extracting a representation for snatch thefts using the attributes from the UAM. This
representation is shown to be effective in distinguishing snatch thefts from regular actions
with high accuracy.In summary, this thesis proposes both supervised and unsupervised approaches for representing
actions which provide better discrimination than existing representations. The
first approach presents a dictionary learning based sparse representation for effective discrimination
of actions. Also, we propose a sparse representation for the human body based
on dictionaries in order to recognize actions with rapid body deformations. In the next
approach, a low-dimensional representation called action-vector for unsupervised action
recognition is presented. Further, linear and non-linear embedding of action-vectors is
proposed for addressing inter-action similarity and fine-grained action recognition, respectively.
Finally, we propose a representation for locating snatch thefts among thousands of
regular interactions in surveillance videos
Combining Text and Image Knowledge with GANs for Zero-Shot Action Recognition in Videos
The recognition of actions in videos is an active research area in machine learning, relevant to multiple domains such as health monitoring, security and social media analysis. Zero-Shot Action Recognition (ZSAR) is a challenging problem in which models are trained to identify action classes that have not been seen during the training process. According to the literature, the most promising ZSAR approaches make use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs can synthesise visual embeddings for unseen classes conditioned on either textual information or images related to the class labels. In this paper, we propose a Dual-GAN approach based on the VAEGAN model to prove that the fusion of visual and textual-based knowledge sources is an effective way to improve ZSAR performance. We conduct empirical ZSAR experiments of our approach on the UCF101 dataset. We apply the following embedding fusion methods for combining text-driven and image-driven information: averaging, summation, maximum, and minimum. Our best result from Dual-GAN model is achieved with the maximum embedding fusion approach that results in an average accuracy of 46.37%, which is improved by 5.37% at least compared to the leading approaches
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