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

LSTA: Long Short-Term Attention for Egocentric Action Recognition

Egocentric activity recognition is one of the most challenging tasks in video analysis. It requires a fine-grained discrimination of small objects and their manipulation. While some methods base on strong supervision and attention mechanisms, they are either annotation consuming or do not take spatio-temporal patterns into account. In this paper we propose LSTA as a mechanism to focus on features from spatial relevant parts while attention is being tracked smoothly across the video sequence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LSTA on egocentric activity recognition with an end-to-end trainable two-stream architecture, achieving state of the art performance on four standard benchmarks.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

Object Referring in Videos with Language and Human Gaze

We investigate the problem of object referring (OR) i.e. to localize a target object in a visual scene coming with a language description. Humans perceive the world more as continued video snippets than as static images, and describe objects not only by their appearance, but also by their spatio-temporal context and motion features. Humans also gaze at the object when they issue a referring expression. Existing works for OR mostly focus on static images only, which fall short in providing many such cues. This paper addresses OR in videos with language and human gaze. To that end, we present a new video dataset for OR, with 30, 000 objects over 5, 000 stereo video sequences annotated for their descriptions and gaze. We further propose a novel network model for OR in videos, by integrating appearance, motion, gaze, and spatio-temporal context into one network. Experimental results show that our method effectively utilizes motion cues, human gaze, and spatio-temporal context. Our method outperforms previousOR methods. For dataset and code, please refer https://people.ee.ethz.ch/~arunv/ORGaze.html.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018, 10 pages, 6 figure