Vacant Parking Space Detection Based on Task Consistency and Reinforcement Learning

Manh Hung Nguyen, Tzu-Yin Chao, Ching-Chun Huang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Vacant Space Detection via Semantic Consistency Learning

Slides Poster

In this paper, we proposed a novel task-consistency learning method that allows training a vacant space detection network (target task) based on the logistic consistency with the semantic outcomes from a naive flow-based motion behavior classifier (source task) in a parking lot. By well designing the reward mechanism upon semantic consistency, we show the possibility to train the target network in a reinforcement learning setting. Compared with conventional supervised detection methods, the major contribution of this work is to learn a vacant space detector via semantic consistency rather than supervised labels. The dynamic learning property may make the proposed detector been deployed in different lots easily without heavy training loads. The experiments show that based on the task consistency rewards from the motion behavior classifier, the vacant space detector can be trained successfully.

Similar papers

A Bayesian Approach to Reinforcement Learning of Vision-Based Vehicular Control

Zahra Gharaee, Karl Holmquist, Linbo He, Michael Felsberg

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method for autonomous driving. Our approach employs temporal difference learning in a Bayesian framework to learn vehicle control signals from sensor data. The agent has access to images from a forward facing camera, which are pre-processed to generate semantic segmentation maps. We trained our system using both ground truth and estimated semantic segmentation input. Based on our observations from a large set of experiments, we conclude that training the system on ground truth input data leads to better performance than training the system on estimated input even if estimated input is used for evaluation. The system is trained and evaluated in a realistic simulated urban environment using the CARLA simulator. The simulator also contains a benchmark that allows for comparing to other systems and methods. The required training time of the system is shown to be lower and the performance on the benchmark superior to competing approaches.

Object-Oriented Map Exploration and Construction Based on Auxiliary Task Aided DRL

Junzhe Xu, Jianhua Zhang, Shengyong Chen, Honghai Liu

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Auxiliary Task Aided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Environment Exploration by Autonomous Robots

Similar

Environment exploration by autonomous robots through deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods has attracted more and more attention. However, existing methods usually focus on robot navigation to single or multiple fixed goals, while ignoring the perception and construction of external environments. In this paper, we propose a novel environment exploration task based on DRL, which requires a robot fast and completely perceives all objects of interest, and reconstructs their poses in a global environment map, as much as the robot can do. To this end, we design an auxiliary task aided DRL model, which is integrated with the auxiliary object detection and 6-DoF pose estimation components. The outcome of auxiliary tasks can improve the learning speed and robustness of DRL, as well as the accuracy of object pose estimation. Comprehensive experimental results on the indoor simulation platform AI2-THOR have shown the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving by Transferring Visual Features

Hongli Zhou, Guanwen Zhang, Wei Zhou

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving by Transferring Visual Features

Slides Poster Similar

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved great success in processing vision-based driving tasks. However, the end-to-end training manner makes DRL agents suffer from overfitting training scenes. The agents easily fail to generalize to unseen environments. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning for autonomous driving by transferring visual features. We formulate the DRL training as a perception and control module and introduce adversarial training mechanism for autonomous driving. The perception module is able to extract invariant features between different domains through adversarial training. While the DRL agent can then be trained on the basis of low dimensional states. In this manner, the proposed approach enables trained agents to adapt to unseen environments by learning robust features invariant across various scenes. We evaluate the proposed approach by transferring visual features between different simulators. The experimental results demonstrate the driving policy trained in the source domain can be directly applied in the target domain, and achieve great efficient and effective performance for autonomous driving.

Low Dimensional State Representation Learning with Reward-Shaped Priors

Nicolò Botteghi, Ruben Obbink, Daan Geijs, Mannes Poel, Beril Sirmacek, Christoph Brune, Abeje Mersha, Stefano Stramigioli

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Learning for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning in Robotics

Poster Similar

Reinforcement Learning has been able to solve many complicated robotics tasks without any need of feature engineering in an end-to-end fashion. However, learning the optimal policy directly from the sensory inputs, i.e the observations, often requires processing and storage of huge amount of data. In the context of robotics, the cost of data from real robotics hardware is usually very high, thus solutions that achieves high sample-efficiency are needed. We propose a method that aims at learning a mapping from the observations into a lower dimensional state space. This mapping is learned with unsupervised learning using loss functions shaped to incorporate prior knowledge of the environment and the task. Using the samples from the state space, the optimal policy is quickly and efficiently learned. We test the method on several mobile robot navigation tasks in simulation environment and also on a real robot.

Can Reinforcement Learning Lead to Healthy Life?: Simulation Study Based on User Activity Logs

Masami Takahashi, Masahiro Kohjima, Takeshi Kurashima, Hiroyuki Toda

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Reinforcement Learning for Healthy Daily Life

Slides Poster Similar

The importance of developing an application based on intervention technology that leads to a healthier life is widely recognized. A challenging part of realizing the application is the need for planning, i.e., considering a user's health goal (e.g., sleep at 10:00 p.m. to get enough sleep), providing intervention at the appropriate timing to help the user achieve the goal. The reinforcement learning (RL) approach is well suited to this type of problem since it is a methodology for planning; RL finds the optimal strategy as that which maximizes future expected profit. The purpose of this study is to clarify the effects of intervention based on RL to support healthy daily life. Therefore, we (i) collect real daily activity data from participants, (ii) generate a user model that imitates the user's response to system interventions, (iii) examine valuable goals and design them as rewards in RL and (iv) obtain optimal intervention strategies by RL via simulations given a user model and goals. We evaluate a generated user model and verify by simulations whether our method could successfully achieve the goal. In addition, we analyze the cases that demonstrated higher probability of achieving the goal and report the features.

Meta Learning Via Learned Loss

Sarah Bechtle, Artem Molchanov, Yevgen Chebotar, Edward Thomas Grefenstette, Ludovic Righetti, Gaurav Sukhatme, Franziska Meier

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; meta-learning for learning parametric loss functions that generalize across different tasks and model architectures

Slides Similar

Typically, loss functions, regularization mechanisms and other important aspects of training parametric models are chosen heuristically from a limited set of options. In this paper, we take the first step towards automating this process, with the view of producing models which train faster and more robustly. Concretely, we present a meta-learning method for learning parametric loss functions that can generalize across different tasks and model architectures. We develop a pipeline for “meta-training” such loss functions, targeted at maximizing the performance of the model trained under them. The loss landscape produced by our learned losses significantly improves upon the original task-specific losses in both supervised and reinforcement learning tasks. Furthermore, we show that our meta-learning framework is flexible enough to incorporate additional information at meta-train time. This information shapes the learned loss function such that the environment does not need to provide this information during meta-test time.

Detecting and Adapting to Crisis Pattern with Context Based Deep Reinforcement Learning

Eric Benhamou, David Saltiel Saltiel, Jean-Jacques Ohana Ohana, Jamal Atif Atif

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Deep Reinforcement Learning for Financial Crisis Detection and Dis-Investment

Slides Poster Similar

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has reached super human levels in complexes tasks like game solving (Go, StarCraft II), and autonomous driving. However, it remains an open question whether DRL can reach human level in applications to financial problems and in particular in detecting pattern crisis and consequently dis-investing. In this paper, we present an innovative DRL framework consisting in two sub-networks fed respectively with portfolio strategies past performances and standard deviation as well as additional contextual features. The second sub network plays an important role as it captures dependencies with common financial indicators features like risk aversion, economic surprise index and correlations between assets that allows taking into account context based information. We compare different network architectures either using layers of convolutions to reduce network's complexity or LSTM block to capture time dependency and whether previous allocations is important in the modeling. We also use adversarial training to make the final model more robust. Results on test set show this approach substantially over-performs traditional portfolio optimization methods like Markovitz and is able to detect and anticipate crisis like the current Covid one.

The Effect of Multi-Step Methods on Overestimation in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Lingheng Meng, Rob Gorbet, Dana Kulić

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Step DDPG for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Slides Poster Similar

Multi-step (also called n-step) methods in reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be more efficient than the 1-step method due to faster propagation of the reward signal, both theoretically and empirically, in tasks exploiting tabular representation of the value-function. Recently, research in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) also shows that multi-step methods improve learning speed and final performance in applications where the value-function and policy are represented with deep neural networks. However, there is a lack of understanding about what is actually contributing to the boost of performance. In this work, we analyze the effect of multi-step methods on alleviating the overestimation problem in DRL, where multi-step experiences are sampled from a replay buffer. Specifically building on top of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), we experiment with Multi-step DDPG (MDDPG), where different step sizes are manually set, and with a variant called Mixed Multi-step DDPG (MMDDPG) where an average over different multi-step backups is used as target Q-value. Empirically, we show that both MDDPG and MMDDPG are significantly less affected by the overestimation problem than DDPG with 1-step backup, which consequently results in better final performance and learning speed. We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different ways to do multi-step expansion in order to reduce approximation error, and expose the tradeoff between overestimation and underestimation that underlies offline multi-step methods. Finally, we compare the computational resource needs of TD3 and our proposed methods, since they show comparable final performance and learning speed.

Trajectory Representation Learning for Multi-Task NMRDP Planning

Firas Jarboui, Vianney Perchet

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Exploring Non Markovian Reward Decision Processes for Reinforcement Learning

Slides Poster Similar

Expanding Non Markovian Reward Decision Processes (NMRDP) into Markov Decision Processes (MDP) enables the use of state of the art Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to identify optimal policies. In this paper an approach to exploring NMRDPs and expanding them into MDPs, without the prior knowledge of the reward structure, is proposed. The non Markovianity of the reward function is disentangled under the assumption that sets of similar and dissimilar trajectory batches can be sampled. More precisely, within the same batch, measuring the similarity between any couple of trajectories is permitted, although comparing trajectories from different batches is not possible. A modified version of the triplet loss is optimised to construct a representation of the trajectories under which rewards become Markovian.

Visual Object Tracking in Drone Images with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Derya Gözen, Sedat Ozer

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Deep Reinforcement Learning based Single Object Tracker for Drone Applications

Slides Poster Similar

There is an increasing demand on utilizing camera equipped drones and their applications in many domains varying from agriculture to entertainment and from sports events to surveillance. In such drone applications, an essential and a common task is tracking an object of interest visually. Drone (or UAV) images have different properties when compared to the ground taken (natural) images and those differences introduce additional complexities to the existing object trackers to be directly applied on drone applications. Some important differences among those complexities include (i) smaller object sizes to be tracked and (ii) different orientations and viewing angles yielding different texture and features to be observed. Therefore, new algorithms trained on drone images are needed for the drone-based applications. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based single object tracker that tracks an object of interest in drone images by estimating a series of actions to find the location of the object in the next frame. This is the first work introducing a single object tracker using a deep RL-based technique for drone images. Our proposed solution introduces a novel reward function that aims to reduce the total number of actions taken to estimate the object's location in the next frame and also introduces a different backbone network to be used on low resolution images. Additionally, we introduce a set of new actions into the action library to better deal with the above-mentioned complexities. We compare our proposed solutions to a state of the art tracking algorithm from the recent literature and demonstrate up to 3.87\% improvement in precision and 3.6\% improvement in IoU values on the VisDrone2019 dataset. We also provide additional results on OTB-100 dataset and show up to 3.15\% improvement in precision on the OTB-100 dataset when compared to the same previous state of the art algorithm. Lastly, we analyze the ability to handle some of the challenges faced during tracking, including but not limited to occlusion, deformation, and scale variation for our proposed solutions.

Deep Reinforcement Learning on a Budget: 3D Control and Reasoning without a Supercomputer

Edward Beeching, Jilles Steeve Dibangoye, Olivier Simonin, Christian Wolf

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Deep Reinforcement Learning in Mobile Robots Using 3D Environment Scenarios

Slides Poster Similar

An important goal of research in Deep Reinforcement Learning in mobile robotics is to train agents capableof solving complex tasks, which require a high level of scene understanding and reasoning from an egocentric perspective.When trained from simulations, optimal environments should satisfy a currently unobtainable combination of high-fidelity photographic observations, massive amounts of different environment configurations and fast simulation speeds. In this paper we argue that research on training agents capable of complex reasoning can be simplified by decoupling from the requirement of high fidelity photographic observations. We present a suite of tasks requiring complex reasoning and exploration in continuous,partially observable 3D environments. The objective is to provide challenging scenarios and a robust baseline agent architecture that can be trained on mid-range consumer hardware in under 24h. Our scenarios combine two key advantages: (i) they are based on a simple but highly efficient 3D environment (ViZDoom)which allows high speed simulation (12000fps); (ii) the scenarios provide the user with a range of difficulty settings, in order to identify the limitations of current state of the art algorithms and network architectures. We aim to increase accessibility to the field of Deep-RL by providing baselines for challenging scenarios where new ideas can be iterated on quickly. We argue that the community should be able to address challenging problems in reasoning of mobile agents without the need for a large compute infrastructure.

Learning from Learners: Adapting Reinforcement Learning Agents to Be Competitive in a Card Game

Pablo Vinicius Alves De Barros, Ana Tanevska, Alessandra Sciutti

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Competitive Card Games

Slides Poster Similar

Learning how to adapt to complex and dynamic environments is one of the most important factors that contribute to our intelligence. Endowing artificial agents with this ability is not a simple task, particularly in competitive scenarios. In this paper, we present a broad study on how popular reinforcement learning algorithms can be adapted and implemented to learn and to play a real-world implementation of a competitive multiplayer card game. We propose specific training and validation routines for the learning agents, in order to evaluate how the agents learn to be competitive and explain how they adapt to each others' playing style. Finally, we pinpoint how the behavior of each agent derives from their learning style and create a baseline for future research on this scenario.

ActionSpotter: Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Temporal Action Spotting in Videos

Guillaume Vaudaux-Ruth, Adrien Chan-Hon-Tong, Catherine Achard

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; ActionSpotter: A Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Action Spotting in Video

Slides Poster Similar

Action spotting has recently been proposed as an alternative to action detection and key frame extraction. However, the current state-of-the-art method of action spotting requires an expensive ground truth composed of the search sequences employed by human annotators spotting actions - a critical limitation. In this article, we propose to use a reinforcement learning algorithm to perform efficient action spotting using only the temporal segments from the action detection annotations, thus opening an interesting solution for video understanding. Experiments performed on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet datasets show that the proposed method, named ActionSpotter, leads to good results and outperforms state-of-the-art detection outputs redrawn for this application. In particular, the spotting mean Average Precision on THUMOS14 is significantly improved from 59.7% to 65.6% while skipping 23% of video.

Adaptive Remote Sensing Image Attribute Learning for Active Object Detection

Nuo Xu, Chunlei Huo, Chunhong Pan

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Image Attribute Learning for Active Object Detection

Slides Similar

In recent years, deep learning methods bring incredible progress to the field of object detection. However, in the field of remote sensing image processing, existing methods neglect the relationship between imaging configuration and detection performance, and do not take into account the importance of detection performance feedback for improving image quality. Therefore, detection performance is limited by the passive nature of the conventional object detection framework. In order to solve the above limitations, this paper takes adaptive brightness adjustment and scale adjustment as examples, and proposes an active object detection method based on deep reinforcement learning. The goal of adaptive image attribute learning is to maximize the detection performance. With the help of active object detection and image attribute adjustment strategies, low-quality images can be converted into high-quality images, and the overall performance is improved without retraining the detector.

Explore and Explain: Self-Supervised Navigation and Recounting

Roberto Bigazzi, Federico Landi, Marcella Cornia, Silvia Cascianelli, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Exploring a Photorealistic Environment for Explanation and Navigation

Slides Similar

Embodied AI has been recently gaining attention as it aims to foster the development of autonomous and intelligent agents. In this paper, we devise a novel embodied setting in which an agent needs to explore a previously unknown environment while recounting what it sees during the path. In this context, the agent needs to navigate the environment driven by an exploration goal, select proper moments for description, and output natural language descriptions of relevant objects and scenes. Our model integrates a novel self-supervised exploration module with penalty, and a fully-attentive captioning model for explanation. Also, we investigate different policies for selecting proper moments for explanation, driven by information coming from both the environment and the navigation. Experiments are conducted on photorealistic environments from the Matterport3D dataset and investigate the navigation and explanation capabilities of the agent as well as the role of their interactions.

AOAM: Automatic Optimization of Adjacency Matrix for Graph Convolutional Network

Yuhang Zhang, Hongshuai Ren, Jiexia Ye, Xitong Gao, Yang Wang, Kejiang Ye, Cheng-Zhong Xu

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adjacency Matrix for Graph Convolutional Network in Non-Euclidean Space

Slides Poster Similar

Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is adopted to tackle the problem of the convolution operation in non-Euclidean space. Although previous works on GCN have made some progress, one of their limitations is that their input Adjacency Matrix (AM) is designed manually and requires domain knowledge, which is cumbersome, tedious and error-prone. In addition, entries of this fixed Adjacency Matrix are generally designed as binary values (i.e., ones and zeros) which can not reflect more complex relationship between nodes. However, many applications require a weighted and dynamic Adjacency Matrix instead of an unweighted and fixed Adjacency Matrix. To this end, there are few works focusing on designing a more flexible Adjacency Matrix. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end algorithm to improve the GCN performance by focusing on the Adjacency Matrix. We first provide a calculation method that called node information entropy to update the matrix. Then, we analyze the search strategy in a continuous space and introduce the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method to overcome the demerit of the discrete space search. Finally, we integrate the GCN and reinforcement learning into an end-to-end framework. Our method can automatically define the adjacency matrix without artificial knowledge. At the same time, the proposed approach can deal with any size of the matrix and provide a better value for the network. Four popular datasets are selected to evaluate the capability of our algorithm. The method in this paper achieves the state-of-the-art performance on Cora and Pubmed datasets, respectively, with the accuracy of 84.6% and 81.6%.

Motion-Supervised Co-Part Segmentation

Aliaksandr Siarohin, Subhankar Roy, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Sergey Tulyakov, Elisa Ricci, Nicu Sebe

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Co-Part Segmentation Using Motion Information from Videos

Slides Similar

Recent co-part segmentation methods mostly operate in a supervised learning setting, which requires a large amount of annotated data for training. To overcome this limitation, we propose a self-supervised deep learning method for co-part segmentation. Differently from previous works, our approach develops the idea that motion information inferred from videos can be leveraged to discover meaningful object parts. To this end, our method relies on pairs of frames sampled from the same video. The network learns to predict part segments together with a representation of the motion between two frames, which permits reconstruction of the target image. Through extensive experimental evaluation on publicly available video sequences we demonstrate that our approach can produce improved segmentation maps with respect to previous self-supervised co-part segmentation approaches.

Self-Play or Group Practice: Learning to Play Alternating Markov Game in Multi-Agent System

Chin-Wing Leung, Shuyue Hu, Ho-Fung Leung

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Group Practice for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Slides Poster Similar

The research in reinforcement learning has achieved great success in strategic game playing. These successes are thanks to the incorporation of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to the agent trained under the self-play (SP) environment. By self-play, agents are provided with an incrementally more difficult curriculum which in turn facilitate learning. However, recent research suggests that agents trained via self-play may easily lead to getting stuck in local equilibria. In this paper, we consider a population of agents each independently learns to play an alternating Markov game (AMG). We propose a new training framework---group practice---for a population of decentralized RL agents. By group practice (GP), agents are assigned into multiple learning groups during training, for every episode of games, an agent is randomly paired up and practices with another agent in the learning group. The convergence result to the optimal value function and the Nash equilibrium are proved under the GP framework. Experimental study is conducted by applying GP to Q-learning algorithm and the deep Q-learning with Monte-Carlo tree search on the game of Connect Four and the game of Hex. We verify that GP is the more efficient training scheme than SP given the same amount of training. We also show that the learning effectiveness can even be improved when applying local grouping to agents.

RLST: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Scene Text Detection Refinement

Xuan Peng, Zheng Huang, Kai Chen, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Saccadic Eye Movements and Peripheral Vision for Scene Text Detection using Reinforcement Learning

Slides Poster Similar

Within the research of scene text detection, some previous work has already achieved significant accuracy and efficiency. However, most of the work was generally done without considering about the implicit relationship between detection and eye movements. In this paper, we propose a new method for scene text detection especially for its refinement based on reinforcement learning. The idea of this method is inspired by Saccadic Eye Movements and Peripheral Vision. A saccade makes it possible for humans to orient the gaze to the location where a visual object has appeared. Peripheral vision gathers visual information of surroundings which provides supplement to foveal vision during gazing. We propose a simple pipeline, imitating the way human eyes do a saccade and collect peripheral information, to locate scene text roughly and to refine multi-scale vision field iteratively using reinforcement learning. For both training and evaluation, we use ICDAR2015 Challenge 4 dataset as a base and design several criteria to measure the feasibility of our work.

Deep Next-Best-View Planner for Cross-Season Visual Route Classification

Kurauchi Kanya, Kanji Tanaka

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Active Visual Place Recognition using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Slides Poster Similar

This paper addresses the problem of active visual place recognition (VPR) from a novel perspective of long-term autonomy. In our approach, a next-best-view (NBV) planner plans an optimal action-observation-sequence to maximize the expected cost-performance for a visual route classification task. A difficulty arises from the fact that the NBV planner is trained and tested in different domains (times of day, weather conditions, and seasons). Existing NBV methods may be confused and deteriorated by the domain-shifts, and require significant efforts for adapting them to a new domain. We address this issue by a novel deep convolutional neural network (DNN) -based NBV planner that does not require the adaptation. Our main contributions in this paper are summarized as follows: (1) We present a novel domain-invariant NBV planner that is specifically tailored for DNN-based VPR. (2) We formulate the active VPR as a POMDP problem and present a feasible solution to address the inherent intractability. Specifically, the probability distribution vector (PDV) output by the available DNN is used as a domain-invariant observation model without the need to retrain it. (3) We verify efficacy of the proposed approach through challenging cross-season VPR experiments, where it is confirmed that the proposed approach clearly outperforms the previous single-view-based or multi-view-based VPR in terms of VPR accuracy and/or action-observation-cost.

A Novel Actor Dual-Critic Model for Remote Sensing Image Captioning

Ruchika Chavhan, Biplab Banerjee, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Subhasis Chaudhuri

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Actor Dual-Critic Training for Remote Sensing Image Captioning Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Slides Poster Similar

We deal with the problem of generating textual captions from optical remote sensing (RS) images using the notion of deep reinforcement learning. Due to the high inter-class similarity in reference sentences describing remote sensing data, jointly encoding the sentences and images encourages prediction of captions that are semantically more precise than the ground truth in many cases. To this end, we introduce an Actor Dual-Critic training strategy where a second critic model is deployed in the form of an encoder-decoder RNN to encode the latent information corresponding to the original and generated captions. While all actor-critic methods use an actor to predict sentences for an image and a critic to provide rewards, our proposed encoder-decoder RNN guarantees high-level comprehension of images by sentence-to-image translation. We observe that the proposed model generates sentences on the test data highly similar to the ground truth and is successful in generating even better captions in many critical cases. Extensive experiments on the benchmark Remote Sensing Image Captioning Dataset (RSICD) and the UCM-captions dataset confirm the superiority of the proposed approach in comparison to the previous state-of-the-art where we obtain a gain of sharp increments in both the ROUGE-L and CIDEr measures.

Online Object Recognition Using CNN-Based Algorithm on High-Speed Camera Imaging

Shigeaki Namiki, Keiko Yokoyama, Shoji Yachida, Takashi Shibata, Hiroyoshi Miyano, Masatoshi Ishikawa

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Real-Time Object Recognition with High-Speed Camera Imaging with Population Data Clearing and Data Ensemble

Slides Poster Similar

High-speed camera imaging (e.g., 1,000 fps) is effective to detect and recognize objects moving at high speeds because temporally dense images obtained by a high-speed camera can usually capture the best moment for object detection and recognition. However, the latest recognition algorithms, with their high complexity, are difficult to utilize in real-time applications involving high-speed cameras because a vast amount of images need to be processed with no latency. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework for real-time object recognition with high-speed camera imaging. The proposed framework has the key processes of population data cleansing and data ensemble. Population data cleansing improves the recognition accuracy by quantifying the recognizability and by excluding part of the images prior to the recognition process, while data ensemble improves the robustness of object recognition by merging the class probabilities with multiple images of the same object. Experimental results with a real dataset show that our framework is more effective than existing methods.

Cross-People Mobile-Phone Based Airwriting Character Recognition

Yunzhe Li, Hui Zheng, He Zhu, Haojun Ai, Xiaowei Dong

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Cross-People Airwriting Recognition via Motion Sensor Signal via Deep Neural Network

Slides Poster Similar

Airwriting using mobile phones has many applications in human-computer interaction. However, the recognition of airwriting character needs a lot of training data from user, which brings great difficulties to the pratical application. The model learnt from a specific person often cannot yield satisfied results when used on another person. The data gap between people is mainly caused by the following factors: personal writing styles, mobile phone sensors, and ways to hold mobile phones. To address the cross-people problem, we propose a deep neural network(DNN) that combines convolutional neural network(CNN) and bilateral long short-term memory(BLSTM). In each layer of the network, we also add an AdaBN layer which is able to increase the generalization ability of the DNN. Different from the original AdaBN method, we explore the feasibility for semi-supervised learning. We implement it to our design and conduct comprehensive experiments. The evaluation results show that our system can achieve an accuracy of 99% for recognition and an improvement of 10% on average for transfer learning between various factors such as people, devices and postures. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to implement cross-people airwriting recognition via motion sensor signal, which is a fundamental step towards ubiquitous sensing.

Multiple Future Prediction Leveraging Synthetic Trajectories

Lorenzo Berlincioni, Federico Becattini, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Synthetic Trajectory Prediction using Markov Chains

Slides Poster Similar

Trajectory prediction is an important task, especially in autonomous driving. The ability to forecast the position of other moving agents can yield to an effective planning, ensuring safety for the autonomous vehicle as well for the observed entities. In this work we propose a data driven approach based on Markov Chains to generate synthetic trajectories, which are useful for training a multiple future trajectory predictor. The advantages are twofold: on the one hand synthetic samples can be used to augment existing datasets and train more effective predictors; on the other hand, it allows to generate samples with multiple ground truths, corresponding to diverse equally likely outcomes of the observed trajectory. We define a trajectory prediction model and a loss that explicitly address the multimodality of the problem and we show that combining synthetic and real data leads to prediction improvements, obtaining state of the art results.

Object Segmentation Tracking from Generic Video Cues

Amirhossein Kardoost, Sabine Müller, Joachim Weickert, Margret Keuper

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Light-Weight Variational Framework for Video Object Segmentation in Videos

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a light-weight variational framework for online tracking of object segmentations in videos based on optical flow and image boundaries. While high-end computer vision methods on this task rely on sequence specific training of dedicated CNN architectures, we show the potential of a variational model, based on generic video information from motion and color. Such cues are usually required for tasks such as robot navigation or grasp estimation. We leverage them directly for video object segmentation and thus provide accurate segmentations at potentially very low extra cost. Our simple method can provide competitive results compared to the costly CNN-based methods with parameter tuning. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be combined with state-of-the-art CNN-based segmentations in order to improve over their respective results. We evaluate our method on the datasets DAVIS 16,17 and SegTrack v2.

SynDHN: Multi-Object Fish Tracker Trained on Synthetic Underwater Videos

Mygel Andrei Martija, Prospero Naval

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Underwater Multi-Object Tracking in the Wild with Deep Hungarian Network

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we seek to extend multi-object tracking research on a relatively less explored domain, that of, underwater multi-object tracking in the wild. Multi-object fish tracking is an important task because it can provide fish monitoring systems with richer information (e.g. multiple views of the same fish) as compared to detections and it can be an invaluable input to fish behavior analysis. However, there is a lack of an annotated benchmark dataset with enough samples for this task. To circumvent the need for manual ground truth tracking annotation, we craft a synthetic dataset. Using this synthetic dataset, we train an integrated detector and tracker called SynDHN. SynDHN uses the Deep Hungarian Network (DHN), which is a differentiable approximation of the Hungarian assignment algorithm. We repurpose DHN to become the tracking component of our algorithm by performing the task of affinity estimation between detector predictions. We consider both spatial and appearance features for affinity estimation. Our results show that despite being trained on a synthetic dataset, SynDHN generalizes well to real underwater video tracking and performs better against our baseline algorithms.

Semantic Segmentation for Pedestrian Detection from Motion in Temporal Domain

Guo Cheng, Jiang Yu Zheng

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Motion Profile: Recognizing Pedestrians along with their Motion Directions in a Temporal Way

Slides Poster Similar

In autonomous driving, state-of-the-art methods detect pedestrian through appearance in 2-D spatial images. However, these approaches are typically time-consuming because of the complexity of algorithms to cope with large variations in shape, pose, action, and illumination. They also fall short of capturing temporal continuity in motion trace. In a completely different approach, this work recognizes pedestrians along with their motion directions in a temporal way. By projecting a driving video to a 2-D temporal image called Motion Profile (MP), we can robustly distinguish pedestrian in motion and standing-still against smooth background motion. To ensure non-redundant data processing of deep network on a compact motion profile further, a novel temporal-shift memory (TSM) model is developed to perform deep learning of sequential input in linear processing time. In experiments containing various pedestrian motion from sensors such as video and LiDAR, we demonstrate that, with the data size around 3/720th of video volume, this motion-based method can reach the detecting rate of pedestrians at 90% in near and mid-range on the road. With a super-fast processing speed and good accuracy, this method is promising for intelligent vehicles.

SiamMT: Real-Time Arbitrary Multi-Object Tracking

Lorenzo Vaquero, Manuel Mucientes, Victor Brea

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; SiamMT: A Deep-Learning-based Arbitrary Multi-Object Tracking System for Video

Slides Poster Similar

Visual object tracking is of great interest in many applications, as it preserves the identity of an object throughout a video. However, while real applications demand systems capable of real-time-tracking multiple objects, multi-object tracking solutions usually follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, thus they depend on running a costly detector in each frame, and they do not allow the tracking of arbitrary objects, i.e., they require training for specific classes. In response to this need, this work presents the architecture of SiamMT, a system capable of efficiently applying individual visual tracking techniques to multiple objects in real-time. This makes it the first deep-learning-based arbitrary multi-object tracker. To achieve this, we propose the global frame features extraction by using a fully-convolutional neural network, followed by the cropping and resizing of the different object search areas. The final similarity operation between these search areas and the target exemplars is carried out with an optimized pairwise cross-correlation. These novelties allow the system to track multiple targets in a scalable manner, achieving 25 fps with 60 simultaneous objects for VGA videos and 40 objects for HD720 videos, all with a tracking quality similar to SiamFC.

AVD-Net: Attention Value Decomposition Network for Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Zhang Yuanxin, Huimin Ma, Yu Wang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Attention Value Decomposition Network for Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Slides Poster Similar

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is of importance for variable real-world applications but remains more challenges like stationarity and scalability. While recently value function factorization methods have obtained empirical good results in cooperative multi-agent environment, these works mostly focus on the decomposable learning structures. Inspired by the application of attention mechanism in machine translation and other related domains, we propose an attention based approach called attention value decomposition network (AVD-Net), which capitalizes on the coordination relations between agents. AVD-Net employs centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, which factorizes the joint action-value functions with only local observations and actions of agents. Our method is evaluated on multi-agent particle environment (MPE) and StarCraft micromanagement environment (SMAC). The experiment results show the strength of our approach compared to existing methods with state-of-the-art performance in cooperative scenarios.

Improving Visual Question Answering Using Active Perception on Static Images

Theodoros Bozinis, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Fine-Grained Visual Question Answering with Reinforcement Learning-based Active Perception

Slides Poster Similar

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is one of the most challenging emerging applications of deep learning. Providing powerful attention mechanisms is crucial for VQA, since the model must correctly identify the region of an image that is relevant to the question at hand. However, existing models analyze the input images at a fixed and typically small resolution, often leading to discarding valuable fine-grained details. To overcome this limitation, in this work we propose a reinforcement learning-based active perception approach that works by applying a series of transformation operations on the images (translation, zoom) in order to facilitate answering the question at hand. This allows for performing fine-grained analysis, effectively increasing the resolution at which the models process information. The proposed method is orthogonal to existing attention mechanisms and it can be combined with most existing VQA methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method is experimentally demonstrated on a challenging VQA dataset.

Towards Practical Compressed Video Action Recognition: A Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network

Bing Li, Longteng Kong, Dongming Zhang, Xiuguo Bao, Di Huang, Yunhong Wang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; TEMSN: Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network for Compressed Video Action Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

Current compressed video action recognition methods are mainly based on completely received compressed videos. However, in real transmission, the compressed video packets are usually disorderly received and lost due to network jitters or congestion. It is of great significance to recognize actions in early phases with limited packets, e.g. forecasting the potential risks from videos quickly. In this paper, we proposed a Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network (TEMSN) for practical compressed video action recognition. First, we use three compressed modalities as complementary cues and build a multi-stream network to capture the rich information from compressed video packets. Second, we design a temporal enhanced module based on Encoder-Decoder structure applied on each stream to infer the missing packets, and generate more complete action dynamics. Thanks to the rich modalities and temporal enhancement, our approach is able to better modeling the action with limited compressed packets. Experiments on HMDB-51 and UCF-101 dataset validate its effectiveness and efficiency.

Self-Supervised Joint Encoding of Motion and Appearance for First Person Action Recognition

Mirco Planamente, Andrea Bottino, Barbara Caputo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Single Stream Architecture for Egocentric Action Recognition from the First-Person Point of View

Slides Poster Similar

Wearable cameras are becoming more and more popular in several applications, increasing the interest of the research community in developing approaches for recognizing actions from the first-person point of view. An open challenge in egocentric action recognition is that videos lack detailed information about the main actor's pose and thus tend to record only parts of the movement when focusing on manipulation tasks. Thus, the amount of information about the action itself is limited, making crucial the understanding of the manipulated objects and their context. Many previous works addressed this issue with two-stream architectures, where one stream is dedicated to modeling the appearance of objects involved in the action, and another to extracting motion features from optical flow. In this paper, we argue that learning features jointly from these two information channels is beneficial to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between the two better. To this end, we propose a single stream architecture able to do so, thanks to the addition of a self-supervised block that uses a pretext motion prediction task to intertwine motion and appearance knowledge. Experiments on several publicly available databases show the power of our approach.

RSINet: Rotation-Scale Invariant Network for Online Visual Tracking

Yang Fang, Geunsik Jo, Chang-Hee Lee

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; RSINet: Rotation-Scale Invariant Network for Adaptive Tracking

Slides Poster Similar

Most Siamese network-based trackers perform the tracking process without model update, and cannot learn target-specific variation adaptively. Moreover, Siamese-based trackers infer the new state of tracked objects by generating axis-aligned bounding boxes, which contain extra background noise, and are unable to accurately estimate the rotation and scale transformation of moving objects, thus potentially reducing tracking performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Rotation-Scale Invariant Network (RSINet) to address the above problem. Our RSINet tracker consists of a target-distractor discrimination branch and a rotation-scale estimation branch, the rotation and scale knowledge can be explicitly learned by a multi-task learning method in an end-to-end manner. In addtion, the tracking model is adaptively optimized and updated under spatio-temporal energy control, which ensures model stability and reliability, as well as high tracking efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on OTB-100, VOT2018, and LaSOT benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed RSINet tracker yields new state-of-the-art performance compared with recent trackers, while running at real-time speed about 45 FPS.

What and How? Jointly Forecasting Human Action and Pose

Yanjun Zhu, Yanxia Zhang, Qiong Liu, Andreas Girgensohn

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Forecasting Human Actions and Motion Trajectories with Joint Action Classification and Pose Regression

Slides Poster Similar

Forecasting human actions and motion trajectories addresses the problem of predicting what a person is going to do next and how they will perform it. This is crucial in a wide range of applications such as assisted living and future co-robotic settings. We propose to simultaneously learn actions and action-related human motion dynamics, while existing works perform them independently. In this paper, we present a method to jointly forecast categories of human action and the pose of skeletal joints in the hope that the two tasks can help each other. As a result, our system can predict not only the future actions but also the motion trajectories that will result. To achieve this, we define a task of joint action classification and pose regression. We employ a sequence to sequence encoder-decoder model combined with multi-task learning to forecast future actions and poses progressively before the action happens. Experimental results on two public datasets, IkeaDB and OAD, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Uncertainty-Aware Data Augmentation for Food Recognition

Eduardo Aguilar, Bhalaji Nagarajan, Rupali Khatun, Marc Bolaños, Petia Radeva

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Data Augmentation for Food Recognition Using Epistemic Uncertainty

Slides Poster Similar

Food recognition has recently attracted attention of many researchers. However, high food ambiguity, inter-class variability and intra-class similarity define a real challenge for the Deep learning and Computer Vision algorithms. In order to improve their performance, it is necessary to better understand what the model learns and, from this, to determine the type of data that should be additionally included for being the most beneficial to the training procedure. In this paper, we propose a new data augmentation strategy that estimates and uses the epistemic uncertainty to guide the model training. The method follows an active learning framework, where the new synthetic images are generated from the hard to classify real ones present in the training data based on the epistemic uncertainty. Hence, it allows the food recognition algorithm to focus on difficult images in order to learn their discriminatives features. On the other hand, avoiding data generation from images that do not contribute to the recognition makes it faster and more efficient. We show that the proposed method allows to improve food recognition and provides a better trade-off between micro- and macro-recall measures.

Deep Gait Relative Attribute Using a Signed Quadratic Contrastive Loss

Yuta Hayashi, Shehata Allam, Yasushi Makihara, Daigo Muramatsu, Yasushi Yagi

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Signal-Contrastive Loss for Gait Attributes Estimation

Similar

This paper presents a deep learning-based method to estimate gait attributes (e.g., stately, cool, relax, etc.). Similarly to the existing studies on relative attribute, human perception-based annotations on the gait attributes are given to pairs of gait videos (i.e., the first one is better, tie, and the second one is better), and the relative annotations are utilized to train a ranking model of the gait attribute. More specifically, we design a Siamese (i.e., two-stream) network which takes a pair of gait inputs and output gait attribute score for each. We then introduce a suitable loss function called a signed contrastive loss to train the network parameters with the relative annotation. Unlike the existing loss functions for learning to rank does not inherent a nice property of a quadratic contrastive loss, the proposed signed quadratic contrastive loss function inherents the nice property. The quantitative evaluation results reveal that the proposed method shows better or comparable accuracies of relative attribute prediction against the baseline methods.

Knowledge Distillation for Action Anticipation Via Label Smoothing

Guglielmo Camporese, Pasquale Coscia, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Lamberto Ballan

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Multi-Modal Framework for Action Anticipation using Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Slides Poster Similar

Human capability to anticipate near future from visual observations and non-verbal cues is essential for developing intelligent systems that need to interact with people. Several research areas, such as human-robot interaction (HRI), assisted living or autonomous driving need to foresee future events to avoid crashes or help people. Egocentric scenarios are classic examples where action anticipation is applied due to their numerous applications. Such challenging task demands to capture and model domain's hidden structure to reduce prediction uncertainty. Since multiple actions may equally occur in the future, we treat action anticipation as a multi-label problem with missing labels extending the concept of label smoothing. This idea resembles the knowledge distillation process since useful information is injected into the model during training. We implement a multi-modal framework based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to summarize past observations and make predictions at different time steps. We perform extensive experiments on EPIC-Kitchens and EGTEA Gaze+ datasets including more than 2500 and 100 action classes, respectively. The experiments show that label smoothing systematically improves performance of state-of-the-art models for action anticipation.

Motion U-Net: Multi-Cue Encoder-Decoder Network for Motion Segmentation

Gani Rahmon, Filiz Bunyak, Kannappan Palaniappan

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Motion U-Net: A Deep Learning Framework for Robust Moving Object Detection under Challenging Conditions

Slides Poster Similar

Detection of moving objects is a critical first step in many computer vision applications. Several algorithms for motion and change detection were proposed. However, many of these approaches lack the ability to handle challenging real-world scenarios. Recently, deep learning approaches started to produce impressive solutions to computer vision tasks, particularly for detection and segmentation. Many existing deep learning networks proposed for moving object detection rely only on spatial appearance cues. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-cue and multi-stream network, Motion U-Net (MU-Net), which integrates motion, change, and appearance cues using a deep learning framework for robust moving object detection under challenging conditions. The proposed network consists of a two-stream encoder module followed by feature concatenation and a decoder module. Motion and change cues are computed through our tensor-based motion estimation and a multi-modal background subtraction modules. The proposed system was tested and evaluated on the change detection challenge datasets (CDnet-2014) and compared to state-of-the-art methods. On CDnet-2014 dataset, our approach reaches an average overall F-measure of 0.9852 and outperforms all current state-of-the-art methods. The network was also tested on the unseen SBI-2015 dataset and produced promising results.

Shape Consistent 2D Keypoint Estimation under Domain Shift

Levi Vasconcelos, Massimiliano Mancini, Davide Boscaini, Barbara Caputo, Elisa Ricci

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Deep Adaptation for Keypoint Prediction under Domain Shift

Slides Poster Similar

Recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on deep architectures have shown remarkable performance not only in traditional classification tasks but also in more complex problems involving structured predictions (e.g. semantic segmentation, depth estimation). Following this trend, in this paper we present a novel deep adaptation framework for estimating keypoints under \textit{domain shift}, i.e. when the training (\textit{source}) and the test (\textit{target}) images significantly differ in terms of visual appearance. Our method seamlessly combines three different components: feature alignment, adversarial training and self-supervision. Specifically, our deep architecture leverages from domain-specific distribution alignment layers to perform target adaptation at the feature level. Furthermore, a novel loss is proposed which combines an adversarial term for ensuring aligned predictions in the output space and a geometric consistency term which guarantees coherent predictions between a target sample and its perturbed version. Our extensive experimental evaluation conducted on three publicly available benchmarks shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in the 2D keypoint prediction task.

Recurrent Deep Attention Network for Person Re-Identification

Changhao Wang, Jun Zhou, Xianfei Duan, Guanwen Zhang, Wei Zhou

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Recurrent Deep Attention Network for Person Re-identification

Slides Poster Similar

Person re-identification (re-id) is an important task in video surveillance. It is challenging due to the appearance of person varying a wide range acrossnon-overlapping camera views. Recent years, attention-based models are introduced to learn discriminative representation. In this paper, we consider the attention selection in a natural way as like human moving attention on different parts of the visual field for person re-id. In concrete, we propose a Recurrent Deep Attention Network (RDAN) with an attention selection mechanism based on reinforcement learning. The RDAN aims to adaptively observe the identity-sensitive regions to build up the representation of individuals step by step. Extensive experiments on three person re-id benchmarks Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03-NP demonstrate the proposed method can achieve competitive performance.

SSDL: Self-Supervised Domain Learning for Improved Face Recognition

Samadhi Poornima Kumarasinghe Wickrama Arachchilage, Ebroul Izquierdo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Domain Learning for Face Recognition in unconstrained environments

Slides Poster Similar

Face recognition in unconstrained environments is challenging due to variations in illumination, quality of sensing, motion blur and etc. An individual’s face appearance can vary drastically under different conditions creating a gap between train (source) and varying test (target) data. The domain gap could cause decreased performance levels in direct knowledge transfer from source to target. Despite fine-tuning with domain specific data could be an effective solution, collecting and annotating data for all domains is extremely expensive. To this end, we propose a self-supervised domain learning (SSDL) scheme that trains on triplets mined from unlabelled data. A key factor in effective discriminative learning, is selecting informative triplets. Building on most confident predictions, we follow an “easy-to-hard” scheme of alternate triplet mining and self-learning. Comprehensive experiments on four different benchmarks show that SSDL generalizes well on different domains.

On Embodied Visual Navigation in Real Environments through Habitat

Marco Rosano, Antonino Furnari, Luigi Gulino, Giovanni Maria Farinella

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Learning Navigation Policies on Real World Observations using Real World Images and Sensor and Actuation Noise

Slides Poster Similar

Visual navigation models based on deep learning can learn effective policies when trained on large amounts of visual observations through reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, collecting the required experience deploying a robotic platform in the real world is expensive and time-consuming. To deal with this limitation, several simulation platforms have been proposed in order to train visual navigation policies on virtual environments efficiently. Despite the advantages they offer, simulators present a limited realism in terms of appearance and physical dynamics, leading to navigation policies that do not generalize in the real world. In this paper, we propose a tool based on the Habitat simulator which exploits real world images of the environment, together with sensor and actuator noise models, to produce more realistic navigation episodes. We perform a range of experiments using virtual, real and images transformed with a simple domain adaptation approach. We also assess the impact of sensor and actuation noise on the navigation performance and investigate whether they allow to learn more robust navigation policies. We show that our tool can effectively help to train and evaluate navigation policies on real world observations without running navigation episodes in the real world.

Temporally Coherent Embeddings for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Joshua Knights, Ben Harwood, Daniel Ward, Anthony Vanderkop, Olivia Mackenzie-Ross, Peyman Moghadam

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Temporally Coherent Embeddings for Self-supervised Video Representation Learning

Slides Poster Similar

This paper presents TCE: Temporally Coherent Embeddings for self-supervised video representation learning. The proposed method exploits inherent structure of unlabeled video data to explicitly enforce temporal coherency in the embedding space, rather than indirectly learning it through ranking or predictive proxy tasks. In the same way that high-level visual information in the world changes smoothly, we believe that nearby frames in learned representations will benefit from demonstrating similar properties. Using this assumption, we train our TCE model to encode videos such that adjacent frames exist close to each other and videos are separated from one another. Using TCE we learn robust representations from large quantities of unlabeled video data. We thoroughly analyse and evaluate our self-supervised learned TCE models on a downstream task of video action recognition using multiple challenging benchmarks (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51). With a simple but effective 2D-CNN backbone and only RGB stream inputs, TCE pre-trained representations outperform all previous self-supervised 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN trained on UCF101. The code and pre-trained models for this paper can be downloaded at: https://github.com/csiro-robotics/TCE

Exploring Severe Occlusion: Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation with Gated Convolution

Renshu Gu, Gaoang Wang, Jenq-Neng Hwang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; 3D Human Pose Estimation for Multi-Human Videos with Occlusion

Slides Similar

3D human pose estimation (HPE) is crucial in human behavior analysis, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) applications, and self-driving industry. Videos that contain multiple potentially occluded people captured from freely moving monocular cameras are very common in real-world scenarios, while 3D HPE for such scenarios is quite challenging, partially because there is a lack of such data with accurate 3D ground truth labels in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a temporal regression network with a gated convolution module to transform 2D joints to 3D and recover the missing occluded joints in the meantime. A simple yet effective localization approach is further conducted to transform the normalized pose to the global trajectory. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we also collect a new moving camera multi-human (MMHuman) dataset that includes multiple people with heavy occlusion captured by moving cameras. The 3D ground truth joints are provided by accurate motion capture (MoCap) system. From the experiments on static-camera based Human3.6M data and our own collected moving-camera based data, we show that our proposed method outperforms most state-of-the-art 2D-to-3D pose estimation methods, especially for the scenarios with heavy occlusions.

P-DIFF: Learning Classifier with Noisy Labels Based on Probability Difference Distributions

Wei Hu, Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Fan Zhang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; P-DIFF: A Simple and Effective Training Paradigm for Deep Neural Network Classifier with Noisy Labels

Slides Poster Similar

Learning deep neural network (DNN) classifier with noisy labels is a challenging task because the DNN can easily over- fit on these noisy labels due to its high capability. In this paper, we present a very simple but effective training paradigm called P-DIFF, which can train DNN classifiers but obviously alleviate the adverse impact of noisy labels. Our proposed probability difference distribution implicitly reflects the probability of a training sample to be clean, then this probability is employed to re-weight the corresponding sample during the training process. P-DIFF can also achieve good performance even without prior- knowledge on the noise rate of training samples. Experiments on benchmark datasets also demonstrate that P-DIFF is superior to the state-of-the-art sample selection methods.

Learning with Delayed Feedback

Pranavan Theivendiram, Terence Sim

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Machine Learning with Delayed Feedback

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a novel supervised machine learning strategy, inspired by human learning, that enables an Agent to learn continually over its lifetime. A natural consequence is that the Agent must be able to handle an input whose label is delayed until a later time, or may not arrive at all. Our Agent learns in two steps: a short Seeding phase, in which the Agent's model is initialized with labelled inputs, and an indefinitely long Growing phase, in which the Agent refines and assesses its model if the label is given for an input, but stores the input in a finite-length queue if the label is missing. Queued items are matched against future input-label pairs that arrive, and the model is then updated. Our strategy also allows for the delayed feedback to take a different form. For example, in an image captioning task, the feedback could be a semantic segmentation rather than a textual caption. We show with many experiments that our strategy enables an Agent to learn flexibly and efficiently.

Dual-Mode Iterative Denoiser: Tackling the Weak Label for Anomaly Detection

Shuheng Lin, Hua Yang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Dual-Mode Iterative Denoiser for Crowd Anomaly Detection

Slides Poster Similar

Crowd anomaly detection suffers from limited training data under weak supervision. In this paper, we propose a dual-mode iterative denoiser to tackle the weak label challenge for anomaly detection. First, we use a convolution autoencoder (CAE) in image space to act as a cluster for grouping similar video clips, where the spatial-temporal similarity helps the cluster metric to represent the reconstruction error. Then we use the graph convolution neural network (GCN) to explore the temporal correlation and the feature similarity between video clips within different rough labels, where the classifier can be constantly updated in the label denoising process. Without specific image-level labels, our model can predict the clip-level anomaly probabilities for videos. Extensive experiment results on two public datasets show that our approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

3D Attention Mechanism for Fine-Grained Classification of Table Tennis Strokes Using a Twin Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks

Pierre-Etienne Martin, Jenny Benois-Pineau, Renaud Péteri, Julien Morlier

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Attentional Blocks for Action Recognition in Table Tennis Strokes

Slides Poster Similar

The paper addresses the problem of recognition of actions in video with low inter-class variability such as Table Tennis strokes. Two stream, "twin" convolutional neural networks are used with 3D convolutions both on RGB data and optical flow. Actions are recognized by classification of temporal windows. We introduce 3D attention modules and examine their impact on classification efficiency. In the context of the study of sportsmen performances, a corpus of the particular actions of table tennis strokes is considered. The use of attention blocks in the network speeds up the training step and improves the classification scores up to 5% with our twin model. We visualize the impact on the obtained features and notice correlation between attention and player movements and position. Score comparison of state-of-the-art action classification method and proposed approach with attentional blocks is performed on the corpus. Proposed model with attention blocks outperforms previous model without them and our baseline.