A Quadruple Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Network for Human Motion Prediction

Recurrent neural network (RNN) has become popular for human motion prediction thanks to its ability to capture temporal dependencies. However, it has limited capacity in modeling the complex spatial relationship in the human skeletal structure. In this work, we present a novel diffusion convolutional recurrent predictor for spatial and temporal movement forecasting, with multi-step random walks traversing bidirectionally along an adaptive graph to model interdependency among body joints. In the temporal domain, existing methods rely on a single forward predictor with the produced motion deflecting to the drift route, which leads to error accumulations over time. We propose to supplement the forward predictor with a forward discriminator to alleviate such motion drift in the long term under adversarial training. The solution is further enhanced by a backward predictor and a backward discriminator to effectively reduce the error, such that the system can also look into the past to improve the prediction at early frames. The two-way spatial diffusion convolutions and two-way temporal predictors together form a quadruple network. Furthermore, we train our framework by modeling the velocity from observed motion dynamics instead of static poses to predict future movements that effectively reduces the discontinuity problem at early prediction. Our method outperforms the state of the arts on both 3D and 2D datasets, including the Human3.6M, CMU Motion Capture and Penn Action datasets. The results also show that our method correctly predicts both high-dynamic and low-dynamic moving trends with less motion drift

Towards standard plane prediction of fetal head ultrasound with domain adaption

Fetal Standard Plane (SP) acquisition is a key step in ultrasound based assessment of fetal health. The task detects an ultrasound (US) image with predefined anatomy. However, it requires skill to acquire a good SP in practice, and trainees and occasional users of ultrasound devices can find this challenging. In this work, we consider the task of automatically predicting the fetal head SP from the video approaching the SP. We adopt a domain transfer learning approach that maps the encoded spatial and temporal features of video in the source domain to the spatial representations of the desired SP image in the target domain, together with adversarial training to preserve the quality of the resulting image. Experimental results show that the predicted head plane is plausible and consistent with the anatomical features expected in a real SP. The proposed approach is motivated to support non-experts to find and analyse a trans-ventricular (TV) plane but could also be generalized to other planes, trimesters, and ultrasound imaging tasks for which standard planes are defined

A Two-stream Convolutional Network for Musculoskeletal and Neurological Disorders Prediction

Musculoskeletal and neurological disorders are the most common causes of walking problems among older people, and they often lead to diminished quality of life. Analyzing walking motion data manually requires trained professionals and the evaluations may not always be objective. To facilitate early diagnosis, recent deep learning-based methods have shown promising results for automated analysis, which can discover patterns that have not been found in traditional machine learning methods. We observe that existing work mostly applies deep learning on individual joint features such as the time series of joint positions. Due to the challenge of discovering inter-joint features such as the distance between feet (i.e. the stride width) from generally smaller-scale medical datasets, these methods usually perform sub-optimally. As a result, we propose a solution that explicitly takes both individual joint features and inter-joint features as input, relieving the system from the need of discovering more complicated features from small data. Due to the distinctive nature of the two types of features, we introduce a two-stream framework, with one stream learning from the time series of joint position and the other from the time series of relative joint displacement. We further develop a mid-layer fusion module to combine the discovered patterns in these two streams for diagnosis, which results in a complementary representation of the data for better prediction performance. We validate our system with a benchmark dataset of 3D skeleton motion that involves 45 patients with musculoskeletal and neurological disorders, and achieve a prediction accuracy of 95.56%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods

Gaze-probe joint guidance with multi-task learning in obstetric ultrasound scanning

In this work, we exploit multi-task learning to jointly predict the two decision-making processes of gaze movement and probe manipulation that an experienced sonographer would perform in routine obstetric scanning. A multimodal guidance framework, Multimodal-GuideNet, is proposed to detect the causal relationship between a real-world ultrasound video signal, synchronized gaze, and probe motion. The association between the multi-modality inputs is learned and shared through a modality-aware spatial graph that leverages useful cross-modal dependencies. By estimating the probability distribution of probe and gaze movements in real scans, the predicted guidance signals also allow inter- and intra-sonographer variations and avoid a fixed scanning path. We validate the new multi-modality approach on three types of obstetric scanning examinations, and the result consistently outperforms single-task learning under various guidance policies. To simulate sonographer’s attention on multi-structure images, we also explore multi-step estimation in gaze guidance, and its visual results show that the prediction allows multiple gaze centers that are substantially aligned with underlying anatomical structures

A Two-Stream Recurrent Network for Skeleton-based Human Interaction Recognition

This paper addresses the problem of recognizing human-human interaction from skeletal sequences. Existing methods are mainly designed to classify single human action. Many of them simply stack the movement features of two characters to deal with human interaction, while neglecting the abundant relationships between characters. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream recurrent neural network by adopting the geometric features from both single actions and interactions to describe the spatial correlations with different discriminative abilities. The first stream is constructed under pairwise joint distance (PJD) in a fully-connected mesh to categorize the interactions with explicit distance patterns. To better distinguish similar interactions, in the second stream, we combine PJD with the spatial features from individual joint positions using graph convolutions to detect the implicit correlations among joints, where the joint connections in the graph are adaptive for flexible correlations. After spatial modeling, each stream is fed to a bi-directional LSTM to encode two-way temporal properties. To take advantage of the diverse discriminative power of the two streams, we come up with a late fusion algorithm to combine their output predictions concerning information entropy. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the art performance on 3D and comparable performance on 2D interaction datasets. Moreover, the late fusion results demonstrate the effectiveness of improving the recognition accuracy compared with single streams

Geometric Features Informed Multi-person Human-object Interaction Recognition in Videos

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) recognition in videos is important for analyzing human activity. Most existing work focusing on visual features usually suffer from occlusion in the real-world scenarios. Such a problem will be further complicated when multiple people and objects are involved in HOIs. Consider that geometric features such as human pose and object position provide meaningful information to understand HOIs, we argue to combine the benefits of both visual and geometric features in HOI recognition, and propose a novel Two-level Geometric feature-informed Graph Convolutional Network (2G-GCN). The geometric-level graph models the interdependency between geometric features of humans and objects, while the fusion-level graph further fuses them with visual features of humans and objects. To demonstrate the novelty and effectiveness of our method in challenging scenarios, we propose a new multi-person HOI dataset (MPHOI-72). Extensive experiments on MPHOI-72 (multi-person HOI), CAD-120 (single-human HOI) and Bimanual Actions (two-hand HOI) datasets demonstrate our superior performance compared to state-of-the-arts.Comment: Accepted by ECCV 202

A Two-stream Convolutional Network for Musculoskeletal and Neurological Disorders Prediction

Musculoskeletal and neurological disorders are the most common causes of walking problems among older people, and they often lead to diminished quality of life. Analyzing walking motion data manually requires trained professionals and the evaluations may not always be objective. To facilitate early diagnosis, recent deep learning-based methods have shown promising results for automated analysis, which can discover patterns that have not been found in traditional machine learning methods. We observe that existing work mostly applies deep learning on individual joint features such as the time series of joint positions. Due to the challenge of discovering inter-joint features such as the distance between feet (i.e. the stride width) from generally smaller-scale medical datasets, these methods usually perform sub-optimally. As a result, we propose a solution that explicitly takes both individual joint features and inter-joint features as input, relieving the system from the need of discovering more complicated features from small data. Due to the distinctive nature of the two types of features, we introduce a two-stream framework, with one stream learning from the time series of joint position and the other from the time series of relative joint displacement. We further develop a mid-layer fusion module to combine the discovered patterns in these two streams for diagnosis, which results in a complementary representation of the data for better prediction performance. We validate our system with a benchmark dataset of 3D skeleton motion that involves 45 patients with musculoskeletal and neurological disorders, and achieve a prediction accuracy of 95.56%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods

PyTorch-based Implementation of Label-aware Graph Representation for Multi-class Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory Prediction under diverse patterns has attracted increasing attention in multiple real-world applications ranging from urban traffic analysis to human motion understanding, among which graph convolution network (GCN) is frequently adopted with its superior ability in modeling the complex trajectory interactions among multiple humans. In this work, we propose a python package by enhancing GCN with class label information of the trajectory, such that we can explicitly model not only human trajectories but also that of other road users such as vehicles. This is done by integrating a label-embedded graph with the existing graph structure in the standard graph convolution layer. The flexibility and the portability of the package also allow researchers to employ it under more general multi-class sequential prediction tasks

Semantics-STGCNN: A Semantics-guided Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-class Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the movement trajectories of multiple classes of road users in real-world scenarios is a challenging task due to the diverse trajectory patterns. While recent works of pedestrian trajectory prediction successfully modelled the influence of surrounding neighbours based on the relative distances, they are ineffective on multi-class trajectory prediction. This is because they ignore the impact of the implicit correlations between different types of road users on the trajectory to be predicted—for example, a nearby pedestrian has a different level of influence from a nearby car. In this paper, we propose to introduce class information into a graph convolutional neural network to better predict the trajectory of an individual. We embed the class labels of the surrounding objects into the label adjacency matrix (LAM), which is combined with the velocity-based adjacency matrix (VAM) comprised of the objects’ velocity, thereby generating a semantics-guided graph adjacency (SAM). SAM effectively models semantic information with trainable parameters to automatically learn the embedded label features that will contribute to the fixed velocity-based trajectory. Such information of spatial and temporal dependencies is passed to a graph convolutional and temporal convolutional network to estimate the predicted trajectory distributions. We further propose new metrics, known as Average2 Displacement Error (aADE) and Average Final Displacement Error (aFDE), that assess network accuracy more accurately. We call our framework Semantics-STGCNN. It consistently shows superior performance to the state-of-the-arts in existing and the newly proposed metrics

Interaction mix and match: synthesizing close interaction using conditional hierarchical GAN with multi-hot class embedding

Synthesizing multi-character interactions is a challenging task due to the complex and varied interactions between the characters. In particular, precise spatiotemporal alignment between characters is required in generating close interactions such as dancing and fighting. Existing work in generating multi-character interactions focuses on generating a single type of reactive motion for a given sequence which results in a lack of variety of the resultant motions. In this paper, we propose a novel way to create realistic human reactive motions which are not presented in the given dataset by mixing and matching different types of close interactions. We propose a Conditional Hierarchical Generative Adversarial Network with Multi-Hot Class Embedding to generate the Mix and Match reactive motions of the follower from a given motion sequence of the leader. Experiments are conducted on both noisy (depth-based) and high-quality (MoCap-based) interaction datasets. The quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the given datasets. We also provide an augmented dataset with realistic reactive motions to stimulate future research in this area