23,492 research outputs found
Improving the utilization of training samples in visual recognition
Recognition is a fundamental computer vision problem, in which training samples are used to learn models, that then assign labels to test samples. The utilization of training samples is of vital importance to visual recognition, which can be addressed by increasing the capability of the description methods and the model learning methods. Two visual recognition tasks namely object detection and action recognition and are considered in this thesis.
Active learning utilizes selected subsets of the training dataset as training samples. Active learning methods select the most informative training samples in each iteration, and therefore require fewer training samples to attain comparable performance to passive learning methods. In this thesis, an active learning method for object detection that exploits the distribution of training samples is presented. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms a passive learning method and a simple margin active learning method.
Weakly supervised learning facilitates learning on training samples with weak labels. In this thesis, a weakly supervised object detection method is proposed to utilize training samples with probabilistic labels. Base detectors are used to create object proposals from training samples with weak labels. Then the object proposals are assigned estimated probabilistic labels. A Generalized Hough Transform based object detector is extended to utilize the object proposals with probabilistic labels as training samples. The proposed method is shown to outperform both a comparison method that assigns strong labels to object proposals, and a weakly supervised deformable part-based models method. The proposed method also attains comparable performance to supervised learning methods.
Increasing the capability of the description method can improve the utilization of training samples. In this thesis, temporal pyramid histograms are proposed to address the problem of missing temporal information in the classical bag of features description method used in action recognition. Experiments show that the proposed description method outperforms the classical bag of features method in action recognition
Unsupervised Action Proposal Ranking through Proposal Recombination
Recently, action proposal methods have played an important role in action
recognition tasks, as they reduce the search space dramatically. Most
unsupervised action proposal methods tend to generate hundreds of action
proposals which include many noisy, inconsistent, and unranked action
proposals, while supervised action proposal methods take advantage of
predefined object detectors (e.g., human detector) to refine and score the
action proposals, but they require thousands of manual annotations to train.
Given the action proposals in a video, the goal of the proposed work is to
generate a few better action proposals that are ranked properly. In our
approach, we first divide action proposal into sub-proposal and then use
Dynamic Programming based graph optimization scheme to select the optimal
combinations of sub-proposals from different proposals and assign each new
proposal a score. We propose a new unsupervised image-based actioness detector
that leverages web images and employs it as one of the node scores in our graph
formulation. Moreover, we capture motion information by estimating the number
of motion contours within each action proposal patch. The proposed method is an
unsupervised method that neither needs bounding box annotations nor video level
labels, which is desirable with the current explosion of large-scale action
datasets. Our approach is generic and does not depend on a specific action
proposal method. We evaluate our approach on several publicly available trimmed
and un-trimmed datasets and obtain better performance compared to several
proposal ranking methods. In addition, we demonstrate that properly ranked
proposals produce significantly better action detection as compared to
state-of-the-art proposal based methods
Action Recognition from Single Timestamp Supervision in Untrimmed Videos
Recognising actions in videos relies on labelled supervision during training,
typically the start and end times of each action instance. This supervision is
not only subjective, but also expensive to acquire. Weak video-level
supervision has been successfully exploited for recognition in untrimmed
videos, however it is challenged when the number of different actions in
training videos increases. We propose a method that is supervised by single
timestamps located around each action instance, in untrimmed videos. We replace
expensive action bounds with sampling distributions initialised from these
timestamps. We then use the classifier's response to iteratively update the
sampling distributions. We demonstrate that these distributions converge to the
location and extent of discriminative action segments. We evaluate our method
on three datasets for fine-grained recognition, with increasing number of
different actions per video, and show that single timestamps offer a reasonable
compromise between recognition performance and labelling effort, performing
comparably to full temporal supervision. Our update method improves top-1 test
accuracy by up to 5.4%. across the evaluated datasets.Comment: CVPR 201
AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions
This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic
Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual
actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and
time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person
occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the
definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise
spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person;
(3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips;
(4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies
to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing
datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse
annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the
dataset publicly.
AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic
difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel
approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art
methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories.
While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results
on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new
approaches for video understanding.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2018. Check dataset page
https://research.google.com/ava/ for detail
Learning to Localize and Align Fine-Grained Actions to Sparse Instructions
Automatic generation of textual video descriptions that are time-aligned with
video content is a long-standing goal in computer vision. The task is
challenging due to the difficulty of bridging the semantic gap between the
visual and natural language domains. This paper addresses the task of
automatically generating an alignment between a set of instructions and a first
person video demonstrating an activity. The sparse descriptions and ambiguity
of written instructions create significant alignment challenges. The key to our
approach is the use of egocentric cues to generate a concise set of action
proposals, which are then matched to recipe steps using object recognition and
computational linguistic techniques. We obtain promising results on both the
Extended GTEA Gaze+ dataset and the Bristol Egocentric Object Interactions
Dataset
Extraction and Classification of Diving Clips from Continuous Video Footage
Due to recent advances in technology, the recording and analysis of video
data has become an increasingly common component of athlete training
programmes. Today it is incredibly easy and affordable to set up a fixed camera
and record athletes in a wide range of sports, such as diving, gymnastics,
golf, tennis, etc. However, the manual analysis of the obtained footage is a
time-consuming task which involves isolating actions of interest and
categorizing them using domain-specific knowledge. In order to automate this
kind of task, three challenging sub-problems are often encountered: 1)
temporally cropping events/actions of interest from continuous video; 2)
tracking the object of interest; and 3) classifying the events/actions of
interest.
Most previous work has focused on solving just one of the above sub-problems
in isolation. In contrast, this paper provides a complete solution to the
overall action monitoring task in the context of a challenging real-world
exemplar. Specifically, we address the problem of diving classification. This
is a challenging problem since the person (diver) of interest typically
occupies fewer than 1% of the pixels in each frame. The model is required to
learn the temporal boundaries of a dive, even though other divers and
bystanders may be in view. Finally, the model must be sensitive to subtle
changes in body pose over a large number of frames to determine the
classification code. We provide effective solutions to each of the sub-problems
which combine to provide a highly functional solution to the task as a whole.
The techniques proposed can be easily generalized to video footage recorded
from other sports.Comment: To appear at CVsports 201
- …