Joint learning of object and action detectors

International audienceWhile most existing approaches for detection in videos focus on objects or human actions separately, we aim at jointly detecting objects performing actions, such as cat eating or dog jumping. We introduce an end-to-end multitask objective that jointly learns object-action relationships. We compare it with different training objectives, validate its effectiveness for detecting objects-actions in videos, and show that both tasks of object and action detection benefit from this joint learning. Moreover, the proposed architecture can be used for zero-shot learning of actions: our multitask objective leverages the commonalities of an action performed by different objects, e.g. dog and cat jumping , enabling to detect actions of an object without training with these object-actions pairs. In experiments on the A2D dataset [50], we obtain state-of-the-art results on segmentation of object-action pairs. We finally apply our multitask architecture to detect visual relationships between objects in images of the VRD dataset [24]

Localizing spatially and temporally objects and actions in videos

The rise of deep learning has facilitated remarkable progress in video understanding. This thesis addresses three important tasks of video understanding: video object detection, joint object and action detection, and spatio-temporal action localization. Object class detection is one of the most important challenges in computer vision. Object detectors are usually trained on bounding-boxes from still images. Recently, video has been used as an alternative source of data. Yet, training an object detector on one domain (either still images or videos) and testing on the other one results in a significant performance gap compared to training and testing on the same domain. In the first part of this thesis, we examine the reasons behind this performance gap. We define and evaluate several domain shift factors: spatial location accuracy, appearance diversity, image quality, aspect distribution, and object size and camera framing. We examine the impact of these factors by comparing the detection performance before and after cancelling them out. The results show that all five factors affect the performance of the detectors and their combined effect explains the performance gap. While most existing approaches for detection in videos focus on objects or human actions separately, in the second part of this thesis we aim at detecting non-human centric actions, i.e., objects performing actions, such as cat eating or dog jumping. We introduce an end-to-end multitask objective that jointly learns object-action relationships. We compare it with different training objectives, validate its effectiveness for detecting object-action pairs in videos, and show that both tasks of object and action detection benefit from this joint learning. In experiments on the A2D dataset [Xu et al., 2015], we obtain state-of-the-art results on segmentation of object-action pairs. In the third part, we are the first to propose an action tubelet detector that leverages the temporal continuity of videos instead of operating at the frame level, as state-of-the-art approaches do. The same way modern detectors rely on anchor boxes, our tubelet detector is based on anchor cuboids by taking as input a sequence of frames and outputing tubelets, i.e., sequences of bounding boxes with associated scores. Our tubelet detector outperforms all state of the art on the UCF-Sports [Rodriguez et al., 2008], J-HMDB [Jhuang et al., 2013a], and UCF-101 [Soomro et al., 2012] action localization datasets especially at high overlap thresholds. The improvement in detection performance is explained by both more accurate scores and more precise localization

No Spare Parts: Sharing Part Detectors for Image Categorization

This work aims for image categorization using a representation of distinctive parts. Different from existing part-based work, we argue that parts are naturally shared between image categories and should be modeled as such. We motivate our approach with a quantitative and qualitative analysis by backtracking where selected parts come from. Our analysis shows that in addition to the category parts defining the class, the parts coming from the background context and parts from other image categories improve categorization performance. Part selection should not be done separately for each category, but instead be shared and optimized over all categories. To incorporate part sharing between categories, we present an algorithm based on AdaBoost to jointly optimize part sharing and selection, as well as fusion with the global image representation. We achieve results competitive to the state-of-the-art on object, scene, and action categories, further improving over deep convolutional neural networks

Programmable Agents

We build deep RL agents that execute declarative programs expressed in formal language. The agents learn to ground the terms in this language in their environment, and can generalize their behavior at test time to execute new programs that refer to objects that were not referenced during training. The agents develop disentangled interpretable representations that allow them to generalize to a wide variety of zero-shot semantic tasks