GolfDB: A Video Database for Golf Swing Sequencing

The golf swing is a complex movement requiring considerable full-body coordination to execute proficiently. As such, it is the subject of frequent scrutiny and extensive biomechanical analyses. In this paper, we introduce the notion of golf swing sequencing for detecting key events in the golf swing and facilitating golf swing analysis. To enable consistent evaluation of golf swing sequencing performance, we also introduce the benchmark database GolfDB, consisting of 1400 high-quality golf swing videos, each labeled with event frames, bounding box, player name and sex, club type, and view type. Furthermore, to act as a reference baseline for evaluating golf swing sequencing performance on GolfDB, we propose a lightweight deep neural network called SwingNet, which possesses a hybrid deep convolutional and recurrent neural network architecture. SwingNet correctly detects eight golf swing events at an average rate of 76.1%, and six out of eight events at a rate of 91.8%. In line with the proposed baseline SwingNet, we advocate the use of computationally efficient models in future research to promote in-the-field analysis via deployment on readily-available mobile devices

Human Action Recognition and Prediction: A Survey

Derived from rapid advances in computer vision and machine learning, video analysis tasks have been moving from inferring the present state to predicting the future state. Vision-based action recognition and prediction from videos are such tasks, where action recognition is to infer human actions (present state) based upon complete action executions, and action prediction to predict human actions (future state) based upon incomplete action executions. These two tasks have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as visual surveillance, autonomous driving vehicle, entertainment, and video retrieval, etc. Many attempts have been devoted in the last a few decades in order to build a robust and effective framework for action recognition and prediction. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in the action recognition and prediction. Existing models, popular algorithms, technical difficulties, popular action databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions

Answering Visual What-If Questions: From Actions to Predicted Scene Descriptions

In-depth scene descriptions and question answering tasks have greatly increased the scope of today's definition of scene understanding. While such tasks are in principle open ended, current formulations primarily focus on describing only the current state of the scenes under consideration. In contrast, in this paper, we focus on the future states of the scenes which are also conditioned on actions. We posit this as a question answering task, where an answer has to be given about a future scene state, given observations of the current scene, and a question that includes a hypothetical action. Our solution is a hybrid model which integrates a physics engine into a question answering architecture in order to anticipate future scene states resulting from object-object interactions caused by an action. We demonstrate first results on this challenging new problem and compare to baselines, where we outperform fully data-driven end-to-end learning approaches.Comment: Paper: 18 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Supplementary material: 3 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. To be published in VLEASE ECCV 2018 worksho

Learning Spatiotemporal Features via Video and Text Pair Discrimination

Current video representations heavily rely on learning from manually annotated video datasets which are time-consuming and expensive to acquire. We observe videos are naturally accompanied by abundant text information such as YouTube titles and Instagram captions. In this paper, we leverage this visual-textual connection to learn spatiotemporal features in an efficient weakly-supervised manner. We present a general cross-modal pair discrimination (CPD) framework to capture this correlation between a video and its associated text. Specifically, we adopt noise-contrastive estimation to tackle the computational issue imposed by the huge amount of pair instance classes and design a practical curriculum learning strategy. We train our CPD models on both standard video dataset (Kinetics-210k) and uncurated web video dataset (Instagram-300k) to demonstrate its effectiveness. Without further fine-tuning, the learnt models obtain competitive results for action classification on Kinetics under the linear classification protocol. Moreover, our visual model provides an effective initialization to fine-tune on downstream tasks, which yields a remarkable performance gain for action recognition on UCF101 and HMDB51, compared with the existing state-of-the-art self-supervised training methods. In addition, our CPD model yields a new state of the art for zero-shot action recognition on UCF101 by directly utilizing the learnt visual-textual embeddings. The code will be made available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/CPD-Video.Comment: Technical Repor

Deep Unified Multimodal Embeddings for Understanding both Content and Users in Social Media Networks

There has been an explosion of multimodal content generated on social media networks in the last few years, which has necessitated a deeper understanding of social media content and user behavior. We present a novel content-independent content-user-reaction model for social multimedia content analysis. Compared to prior works that generally tackle semantic content understanding and user behavior modeling in isolation, we propose a generalized solution to these problems within a unified framework. We embed users, images and text drawn from open social media in a common multimodal geometric space, using a novel loss function designed to cope with distant and disparate modalities, and thereby enable seamless three-way retrieval. Our model not only outperforms unimodal embedding based methods on cross-modal retrieval tasks but also shows improvements stemming from jointly solving the two tasks on Twitter data. We also show that the user embeddings learned within our joint multimodal embedding model are better at predicting user interests compared to those learned with unimodal content on Instagram data. Our framework thus goes beyond the prior practice of using explicit leader-follower link information to establish affiliations by extracting implicit content-centric affiliations from isolated users. We provide qualitative results to show that the user clusters emerging from learned embeddings have consistent semantics and the ability of our model to discover fine-grained semantics from noisy and unstructured data. Our work reveals that social multimodal content is inherently multimodal and possesses a consistent structure because in social networks meaning is created through interactions between users and content.Comment: Preprint submitted to IJC

Modeling Image Virality with Pairwise Spatial Transformer Networks

The study of virality and information diffusion online is a topic gaining traction rapidly in the computational social sciences. Computer vision and social network analysis research have also focused on understanding the impact of content and information diffusion in making content viral, with prior approaches not performing significantly well as other traditional classification tasks. In this paper, we present a novel pairwise reformulation of the virality prediction problem as an attribute prediction task and develop a novel algorithm to model image virality on online media using a pairwise neural network. Our model provides significant insights into the features that are responsible for promoting virality and surpasses the existing state-of-the-art by a 12% average improvement in prediction. We also investigate the effect of external category supervision on relative attribute prediction and observe an increase in prediction accuracy for the same across several attribute learning datasets.Comment: 9 pages, Accepted as a full paper at the ACM Multimedia Conference (MM) 201

Prediction and Description of Near-Future Activities in Video

Most of the existing works on human activity analysis focus on recognition or early recognition of the activity labels from complete or partial observations. Similarly, existing video captioning approaches focus on the observed events in videos. Predicting the labels and the captions of future activities where no frames of the predicted activities have been observed is a challenging problem, with important applications that require anticipatory response. In this work, we propose a system that can infer the labels and the captions of a sequence of future activities. Our proposed network for label prediction of a future activity sequence is similar to a hybrid Siamese network with three branches where the first branch takes visual features from the objects present in the scene, the second branch takes observed activity features and the third branch captures the last observed activity features. The predicted labels and the observed scene context are then mapped to meaningful captions using a sequence-to-sequence learning-based method. Experiments on three challenging activity analysis datasets and a video description dataset demonstrate that both our label prediction framework and captioning framework outperform the state-of-the-arts.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 14 table

Towards Physics-informed Deep Learning for Turbulent Flow Prediction

While deep learning has shown tremendous success in a wide range of domains, it remains a grand challenge to incorporate physical principles in a systematic manner to the design, training, and inference of such models. In this paper, we aim to predict turbulent flow by learning its highly nonlinear dynamics from spatiotemporal velocity fields of large-scale fluid flow simulations of relevance to turbulence modeling and climate modeling. We adopt a hybrid approach by marrying two well-established turbulent flow simulation techniques with deep learning. Specifically, we introduce trainable spectral filters in a coupled model of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES), followed by a specialized U-net for prediction. Our approach, which we call turbulent-Flow Net (TF-Net), is grounded in a principled physics model, yet offers the flexibility of learned representations. We compare our model, TF-Net, with state-of-the-art baselines and observe significant reductions in error for predictions 60 frames ahead. Most importantly, our method predicts physical fields that obey desirable physical characteristics, such as conservation of mass, whilst faithfully emulating the turbulent kinetic energy field and spectrum, which are critical for accurate prediction of turbulent flows

Predicting How to Distribute Work Between Algorithms and Humans to Segment an Image Batch

Foreground object segmentation is a critical step for many image analysis tasks. While automated methods can produce high-quality results, their failures disappoint users in need of practical solutions. We propose a resource allocation framework for predicting how best to allocate a fixed budget of human annotation effort in order to collect higher quality segmentations for a given batch of images and automated methods. The framework is based on a prediction module that estimates the quality of given algorithm-drawn segmentations. We demonstrate the value of the framework for two novel tasks related to predicting how to distribute annotation efforts between algorithms and humans. Specifically, we develop two systems that automatically decide, for a batch of images, when to recruit humans versus computers to create 1) coarse segmentations required to initialize segmentation tools and 2) final, fine-grained segmentations. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of relying on a mix of human and computer efforts over relying on either resource alone for segmenting objects in images coming from three diverse modalities (visible, phase contrast microscopy, and fluorescence microscopy)

Modeling Multimodal Clues in a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Video Classification

Videos are inherently multimodal. This paper studies the problem of how to fully exploit the abundant multimodal clues for improved video categorization. We introduce a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates useful clues from multiple modalities, including static spatial appearance information, motion patterns within a short time window, audio information as well as long-range temporal dynamics. More specifically, we utilize three Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) operating on appearance, motion and audio signals to extract their corresponding features. We then employ a feature fusion network to derive a unified representation with an aim to capture the relationships among features. Furthermore, to exploit the long-range temporal dynamics in videos, we apply two Long Short Term Memory networks with extracted appearance and motion features as inputs. Finally, we also propose to refine the prediction scores by leveraging contextual relationships among video semantics. The hybrid deep learning framework is able to exploit a comprehensive set of multimodal features for video classification. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that (1) LSTM networks which model sequences in an explicitly recurrent manner are highly complementary with CNN models; (2) the feature fusion network which produces a fused representation through modeling feature relationships outperforms alternative fusion strategies; (3) the semantic context of video classes can help further refine the predictions for improved performance. Experimental results on two challenging benchmarks, the UCF-101 and the Columbia Consumer Videos (CCV), provide strong quantitative evidence that our framework achieves promising results: $93.1\%$ on the UCF-101 and $84.5\%$ on the CCV, outperforming competing methods with clear margins