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Applying (3+2+1)D Residual Neural Network with Frame Selection for Hong Kong Sign Language Recognition

Zhenxing Zhou, King-Shan Lui, Vincent W.L. Tam, Edmund Y. Lam

Auto-TLDR; Hong Kong Sign Language Recognition with 3D Residual Neural Network and Resilience Model

Abstract Slides Poster

As reported by Hong Kong Government in 2017, there are more than 1.5 million residents suffering from hearing impairment in Hong Kong. Most of them rely on Hong Kong Sign Language for daily communication while there are only 63 registered sign language interpreters in Hong Kong. To address this specific social issue and also facilitate the effective communication between the hearing impaired and other people, this paper introduces a word-level Hong Kong Sign Language(HKSL) dataset which currently includes 45 isolated words and at least 30 sign videos per word performed by different signers(more than 1500 videos in total now and still enlarging). Based on this dataset, this paper systemically compares the performances of various deep learning approaches, including (1) 2D histogram of oriented gradients(HOG) feature/pose estimation/feature extraction with long-short term memory(LSTM) layer; (2) 3D Residual Neural Network(ResNet) (3) (2+1)D Residual Neural Network, in HKSL recognition. Meanwhile, to further improve the accuracy of sign language recognition, this paper proposes a novel method called (3+2+1)D ResNet Model with Frame Selection which adopts blurriness detection with Laplacian kernel to construct highquality video clips and also combines both (2+1)D and 3D ResNet for recognizing the sign language. At the end, the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other deep learning approaches and attain an impressive accuracy of 94.6% in our dataset.

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Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Iterative Spatiotemporal Fine-Tuning

Kenessary Koishybay, Medet Mukushev, Anara Sandygulova

Auto-TLDR; A Deep Neural Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Iterative Gloss Recognition

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This paper aims to develop a deep neural network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) with iterative Gloss Recognition (GR) fine-tuning. CSLR has been a popular research field in the last years and iterative optimization methods are well established. This paper introduces our proposed architecture involving Spatiotemporal feature-extraction model to segment useful ``gloss-unit" features and BiLSTM with CTC as a sequence model. Spatiotemporal Feature Extractor is used for both image features extraction and sequence length reduction. To this end, we compare different architectures for feature extraction and sequence model. In addition, we iteratively fine-tune feature extractor on gloss-unit video segments with alignments from the end2end model. During the iterative training, we use novel alignment correction technique, which is based on minimum transformations of Levenshtein distance. All the experiments were conducted on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014 dataset.

Recognizing American Sign Language Nonmanual Signal Grammar Errors in Continuous Videos

Elahe Vahdani, Longlong Jing, Ying-Li Tian, Matt Huenerfauth

Auto-TLDR; ASL-HW-RGBD: Recognizing Grammatical Errors in Continuous Sign Language

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As part of the development of an educational tool that can help students achieve fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) through independent and interactive practice with immediate feedback, this paper introduces a near real-time system to recognize grammatical errors in continuous signing videos without necessarily identifying the entire sequence of signs. Our system automatically recognizes if a performance of ASL sentences contains grammatical errors made by ASL students. We first recognize the ASL grammatical elements including both manual gestures and nonmanual signals independently from multiple modalities (i.e. hand gestures, facial expressions, and head movements) by 3D-ResNet networks. Then the temporal boundaries of grammatical elements from different modalities are examined to detect ASL grammatical mistakes by using a sliding window-based approach. We have collected a dataset of continuous sign language, ASL-HW-RGBD, covering different aspects of ASL grammars for training and testing. Our system is able to recognize grammatical elements on ASL-HW-RGBD from manual gestures, facial expressions, and head movements and successfully detect 8 ASL grammatical mistakes.

RWF-2000: An Open Large Scale Video Database for Violence Detection

Ming Cheng, Kunjing Cai, Ming Li

Auto-TLDR; Flow Gated Network for Violence Detection in Surveillance Cameras

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In recent years, surveillance cameras are widely deployed in public places, and the general crime rate has been reduced significantly due to these ubiquitous devices. Usually, these cameras provide cues and evidence after crimes were conducted, while they are rarely used to prevent or stop criminal activities in time. It is both time and labor consuming to manually monitor a large amount of video data from surveillance cameras. Therefore, automatically recognizing violent behaviors from video signals becomes essential. In this paper, we summarize several existing video datasets for violence detection and propose a new video dataset with 2,000 videos all captured by surveillance cameras in real-world scenes. Also, we present a new method that utilizes both the merits of 3D-CNNs and optical flow, namely Flow Gated Network. The proposed approach obtains an accuracy of 87.25% on the test set of our proposed RWF-2000 database. The proposed database and source codes of this paper are currently open to access.

Context Matters: Self-Attention for Sign Language Recognition

Fares Ben Slimane, Mohamed Bouguessa

Auto-TLDR; Attentional Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

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This paper proposes an attentional network for the task of Continuous Sign Language Recognition. The proposed approach exploits co-independent streams of data to model the sign language modalities. These different channels of information can share a complex temporal structure between each other. For that reason, we apply attention to synchronize and help capture entangled dependencies between the different sign language components. Even though Sign Language is multi-channel, handshapes represent the central entities in sign interpretation. Seeing handshapes in their correct context defines the meaning of a sign. Taking that into account, we utilize the attention mechanism to efficiently aggregate the hand features with their appropriate Spatio-temporal context for better sign recognition. We found that by doing so the model is able to identify the essential Sign Language components that revolve around the dominant hand and the face areas. We test our model on the benchmark dataset RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014, yielding competitive results.

Pose-Based Body Language Recognition for Emotion and Psychiatric Symptom Interpretation

Zhengyuan Yang, Amanda Kay, Yuncheng Li, Wendi Cross, Jiebo Luo

Auto-TLDR; Body Language Based Emotion Recognition for Psychiatric Symptoms Prediction

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Inspired by the human ability to infer emotions from body language, we propose an automated framework for body language based emotion recognition starting from regular RGB videos. In collaboration with psychologists, we further extend the framework for psychiatric symptom prediction. Because a specific application domain of the proposed framework may only supply a limited amount of data, the framework is designed to work on a small training set and possess a good transferability. The proposed system in the first stage generates sequences of body language predictions based on human poses estimated from input videos. In the second stage, the predicted sequences are fed into a temporal network for emotion interpretation and psychiatric symptom prediction. We first validate the accuracy and transferability of the proposed body language recognition method on several public action recognition datasets. We then evaluate the framework on a proposed URMC dataset, which consists of conversations between a standardized patient and a behavioral health professional, along with expert annotations of body language, emotions, and potential psychiatric symptoms. The proposed framework outperforms other methods on the URMC dataset.

Exploiting the Logits: Joint Sign Language Recognition and Spell-Correction

Christina Runkel, Stefan Dorenkamp, Hartmut Bauermeister, Michael Möller

Auto-TLDR; A Convolutional Neural Network for Spell-correction in Sign Language Videos

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Machine learning techniques have excelled in the automatic semantic analysis of images, reaching human-level performances on challenging bechmarks. Yet, the semantic analysis of videos remains challenging due to the significantly higher dimensionality of the input data, respectively, the significantly higher need for annotated training examples. By studying the automatic recognition of German sign language videos, we demonstrate that on the relatively scarce training data of 2.800 videos, modern deep learning architectures for video analysis (such as ResNeXt) along with transfer learning on large gesture recognition tasks, can achieve about 75% character accuracy. Considering that this leaves us with a probability of under 25% that a five letter word is spelled correctly, spell-correction systems are crucial for producing readable outputs. The contribution of this paper is to propose a convolutional neural network for spell-correction that expects the softmax outputs of the character recognition network (instead of a misspelled word) as an input. We demonstrate that purely learning on softmax inputs in combination with scarce training data yields overfitting as the network learns the inputs by heart. In contrast, training the network on several variants of the logits of the classification output i.e. scaling by a constant factor, adding of random noise, mixing of softmax and hardmax inputs or purely training on hardmax inputs, leads to better generalization while benefitting from the significant information hidden in these outputs (that have 98% top-5 accuracy), yielding a readable text despite the comparably low character accuracy.

A Grid-Based Representation for Human Action Recognition

Soufiane Lamghari, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier

Auto-TLDR; GRAR: Grid-based Representation for Action Recognition in Videos

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Human action recognition (HAR) in videos is a fundamental research topic in computer vision. It consists mainly in understanding actions performed by humans based on a sequence of visual observations. In recent years, HAR have witnessed significant progress, especially with the emergence of deep learning models. However, most of existing approaches for action recognition rely on information that is not always relevant for the task, and are limited in the way they fuse temporal information. In this paper, we propose a novel method for human action recognition that encodes efficiently the most discriminative appearance information of an action with explicit attention on representative pose features, into a new compact grid representation. Our GRAR (Grid-based Representation for Action Recognition) method is tested on several benchmark datasets that demonstrate that our model can accurately recognize human actions, despite intra-class appearance variations and occlusion challenges.

Channel-Wise Dense Connection Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Michael Lao Banteng, Zhiyong Wu

Auto-TLDR; Two-stream channel-wise dense connection GCN for human action recognition

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Skeleton-based action recognition task has drawn much attention for many years. Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has proved its effectiveness in this task. However, how to improve the model's robustness to different human actions and how to make effective use of features produced by the network are main topics needed to be further explored. Human actions are time series sequence, meaning that temporal information is a key factor to model the representation of data. The ranges of body parts involved in small actions (e.g. raise a glass or shake head) and big actions (e.g. walking or jumping) are diverse. It's crucial for the model to generate and utilize more features that can be adaptive to a wider range of actions. Furthermore, feature channels are specific with the action class, the model needs to weigh their importance and pay attention to more related ones. To address these problems, in this work, we propose a two-stream channel-wise dense connection GCN (2s-CDGCN). Specifically, the skeleton data was extracted and processed into spatial and temporal information for better feature representation. A channel-wise attention module was used to select and emphasize the more useful features generated by the network. Moreover, to ensure maximum information flow, dense connection was introduced to the network structure, which enables the network to reuse the skeleton features and generate more information adaptive and related to different human actions. Our model has shown its ability to improve the accuracy of human action recognition task on two large datasets, NTU-RGB+D and Kinetics. Extensive evaluations were conducted to prove the effectiveness of our model.

MixTConv: Mixed Temporal Convolutional Kernels for Efficient Action Recognition

Kaiyu Shan, Yongtao Wang, Zhi Tang, Ying Chen, Yangyan Li

Auto-TLDR; Mixed Temporal Convolution for Action Recognition

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To efficiently extract spatiotemporal features of video for action recognition, most state-of-the-art methods integrate 1D temporal convolution into a conventional 2D CNN backbone. However, they all exploit 1D temporal convolution of fixed kernel size (i.e., 3) in the network building block, thus have suboptimal temporal modeling capability to handle both long term and short-term actions. To address this problem, we first investigate the impacts of different kernel sizes for the 1D temporal convolutional filters. Then, we propose a simple yet efficient operation called Mixed Temporal Convolution (MixTConv) in methodology, which consists of multiple depthwise 1D convolutional filters with different kernel sizes. By plugging MixTConv into the conventional 2D CNN backbone ResNet-50, we further propose an efficient and effective network architecture named MSTNet for action recognition, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple large-scale benchmarks.

What and How? Jointly Forecasting Human Action and Pose

Yanjun Zhu, Yanxia Zhang, Qiong Liu, Andreas Girgensohn

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

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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.

Concept Embedding through Canonical Forms: A Case Study on Zero-Shot ASL Recognition

Azamat Kamzin, Apurupa Amperyani, Prasanth Sukhapalli, Ayan Banerjee, Sandeep Gupta

Auto-TLDR; A canonical form of gestures in American Sign Language

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In the recognition problem, a canonical form that expresses the spatio-temporal relation of concepts for a given class can potentially increase accuracy. Concepts are defined as attributes that can be recognized using a soft matching paradigm. We consider the specific case study of American Sign Language (ASL) to show that canonical forms of classes can be used to recognize unseen gestures. There are several advantages of a canonical form of gestures including translation between gestures, gesture-based searching, and automated transcription of gestures into any spoken language. We applied our technique to two independently collected datasets: a) IMPACT Lab dataset: 23 ASL gestures each executed three times from 130 first time ASL learners as training data and b) ASLTEXT dataset: 190 gestures each executed six times on an average. Our technique was able to recognize 19 arbitrarily chosen previously unseen gestures in the IMPACT dataset from seven individuals who are not a part of 130 and 34 unseen gestures from the ASLTEXT dataset without any retraining. Our normalized accuracy on ASLTEXT dataset is 66 % which is 13.6 % higher than state-of-art technique.

Depth Videos for the Classification of Micro-Expressions

Ankith Jain Rakesh Kumar, Bir Bhanu, Christopher Casey, Sierra Cheung, Aaron Seitz

Auto-TLDR; RGB-D Dataset for the Classification of Facial Micro-expressions

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Facial micro-expressions are spontaneous, subtle, involuntary muscle movements occurring briefly on the face. The spotting and recognition of these expressions are difficult due to the subtle behavior, and the time duration of these expressions is about half a second, which makes it difficult for humans to identify them. These micro-expressions have many applications in our daily life, such as in the field of online learning, game playing, lie detection, and therapy sessions. Traditionally, researchers use RGB images/videos to spot and classify these micro-expressions, which pose challenging problems, such as illumination, privacy concerns and pose variation. The use of depth videos solves these issues to some extent, as the depth videos are not susceptible to the variation in illumination. This paper describes the collection of a first RGB-D dataset for the classification of facial micro-expressions into 6 universal expressions: Anger, Happy, Sad, Fear, Disgust, and Surprise. This paper shows the comparison between the RGB and Depth videos for the classification of facial micro-expressions. Further, a comparison of results shows that depth videos alone can be used to classify facial micro-expressions correctly in a decision tree structure by using the traditional and deep learning approaches with good classification accuracy. The dataset will be released to the public in the near future.

Temporal Attention-Augmented Graph Convolutional Network for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition

Negar Heidari, Alexandros Iosifidis

Auto-TLDR; Temporal Attention Module for Efficient Graph Convolutional Network-based Action Recognition

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Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been very successful in modeling non-Euclidean data structures, like sequences of body skeletons forming actions modeled as spatio-temporal graphs. Most GCN-based action recognition methods use deep feed-forward networks with high computational complexity to process all skeletons in an action. This leads to a high number of floating point operations (ranging from 16G to 100G FLOPs) to process a single sample, making their adoption in restricted computation application scenarios infeasible. In this paper, we propose a temporal attention module (TAM) for increasing the efficiency in skeleton-based action recognition by selecting the most informative skeletons of an action at the early layers of the network. We incorporate the TAM in a light-weight GCN topology to further reduce the overall number of computations. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms with a large margin the baseline GCN-based method while having 2.9 times less number of computations. Moreover, it performs on par with the state-of-the-art with up to 9.6 times less number of computations.

JT-MGCN: Joint-Temporal Motion Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Suekyeong Nam, Seungkyu Lee

Auto-TLDR; Joint-temporal Motion Graph Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition

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Recently, action recognition methods using graph convolutional networks (GCN) have shown remarkable performance thanks to its concise but effective representation of human body motion. Prior methods construct human body motion graph building edges between neighbor or distant body joints. On the other hand, human action contains lots of temporal variations showing strong temporal correlations between joint motions. Thus the characterization of an action requires a comprehensive analysis of joint motion correlations on spatial and temporal domains. In this paper, we propose Joint-temporal Motion Graph Convolutional Networks (JT-MGCN) in which joint-temporal edges learn the correlations between different joints at different time. Experimental evaluation on large public data sets such as NTU rgb+d data set and kinetics-skeleton data set show outstanding action recognition performance.

A Multi-Task Neural Network for Action Recognition with 3D Key-Points

Rongxiao Tang, Wang Luyang, Zhenhua Guo

Auto-TLDR; Multi-task Neural Network for Action Recognition and 3D Human Pose Estimation

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Action recognition and 3D human pose estimation are the fundamental problems in computer vision and closely related. In this work, we propose a multi-task neural network for action recognition and 3D human pose estimation. The results of the previous methods are still error-prone especially when tested against the images taken in-the-wild, leading error results in action recognition. To solve this problem, we propose a principled approach to generate high quality 3D pose ground truth given any in-the-wild image with a person inside. We achieve this by first devising a novel stereo inspired neural network to directly map any 2D pose to high quality 3D counterpart. Based on the high-quality 3D labels, we carefully design the multi-task framework for action recognition and 3D human pose estimation. The proposed architecture can utilize the shallow, deep features of the images, and the in-the-wild 3D human key-points to guide a more precise result. High quality 3D key-points can fully reflect the morphological features of motions, thus boosting the performance on action recognition. Experiments demonstrate that 3D pose estimation leads to significantly higher performance on action recognition than separated learning. We also evaluate the generalization ability of our method both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed architecture performs favorably against the baseline 3D pose estimation methods. In addition, the reported results on Penn Action and NTU datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the action recognition task.

Video Representation Fusion Network For Multi-Label Movie Genre Classification

Tianyu Bi, Dmitri Jarnikov, Johan Lukkien

Auto-TLDR; A Video Representation Fusion Network for Movie Genre Classification

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In this paper, we introduce a Video Representation Fusion Network (VRFN) for movie genre classification. Different from the previous works, which use frame-level features for movie genre classification, our approach uses video classification architecture to create video-level features from a group of frames and fuse these features temporally to learn long-term spatiotemporal information for the movie genre classification task. We use a pre-trained I3D model to generate intermediate video representations and connect it with a C3D-LSTM model for feature fusion and movie genre classification. LMTD-9 dataset which contains 4007 trailers multi-labeled with 9 movie genres is used for training and evaluation of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that learning long-term temporal dependencies by fusing video representations improves the performance in movie genre classification. Our best model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 3.4% improvement in AUPRC (macro).

Enriching Video Captions with Contextual Text

Philipp Rimle, Pelin Dogan, Markus Gross

Auto-TLDR; Contextualized Video Captioning Using Contextual Text

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Understanding video content and generating caption with context is an important and challenging task. Unlike prior methods that typically attempt to generate generic video captions without context, our architecture contextualizes captioning by infusing extracted information from relevant text data. We propose an end-to-end sequence-to-sequence model which generates video captions based on visual input, and mines relevant knowledge such as names and locations from contextual text. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not preprocess the text further, and let the model directly learn to attend over it. Guided by the visual input, the model is able to copy words from the contextual text via a pointer-generator network, allowing to produce more specific video captions. We show competitive performance on the News Video Dataset and, through ablation studies, validate the efficacy of contextual video captioning as well as individual design choices in our model architecture.

TinyVIRAT: Low-Resolution Video Action Recognition

Ugur Demir, Yogesh Rawat, Mubarak Shah

Auto-TLDR; TinyVIRAT: A Progressive Generative Approach for Action Recognition in Videos

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The existing research in action recognition is mostly focused on high-quality videos where the action is distinctly visible. In real-world surveillance environments, the actions in videos are captured at a wide range of resolutions. Most activities occur at a distance with a small resolution and recognizing such activities is a challenging problem. In this work, we focus on recognizing tiny actions in videos. We introduce a benchmark dataset, TinyVIRAT, which contains natural low-resolution activities. The actions in TinyVIRAT videos have multiple labels and they are extracted from surveillance videos which makes them realistic and more challenging. We propose a novel method for recognizing tiny actions in videos which utilizes a progressive generative approach to improve the quality of low-resolution actions. The proposed method also consists of a weakly trained attention mechanism which helps in focusing on the activity regions in the video. We perform extensive experiments to benchmark the proposed TinyVIRAT dataset and observe that the proposed method significantly improves the action recognition performance over baselines. We also evaluate the proposed approach on synthetically resized action recognition datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results when compared with existing methods. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

MFI: Multi-Range Feature Interchange for Video Action Recognition

Sikai Bai, Qi Wang, Xuelong Li

Auto-TLDR; Multi-range Feature Interchange Network for Action Recognition in Videos

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Short-range motion features and long-range dependencies are two complementary and vital cues for action recognition in videos, but it remains unclear how to efficiently and effectively extract these two features. In this paper, we propose a novel network to capture these two features in a unified 2D framework. Specifically, we first construct a Short-range Temporal Interchange (STI) block, which contains a Channels-wise Temporal Interchange (CTI) module for encoding short-range motion features. Then a Graph-based Regional Interchange (GRI) module is built to present long-range dependencies using graph convolution. Finally, we replace original bottleneck blocks in the ResNet with STI blocks and insert several GRI modules between STI blocks, to form a Multi-range Feature Interchange (MFI) Network. Practically, extensive experiments are conducted on three action recognition datasets (i.e., Something-Something V1, HMDB51, and UCF101), which demonstrate that the proposed MFI network achieves impressive results with very limited computing cost.

Exploring Spatial-Temporal Representations for fNIRS-based Intimacy Detection via an Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Chao Li, Qian Zhang, Ziping Zhao

Auto-TLDR; Intimate Relationship Prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

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The detection of intimacy plays a crucial role in the improvement of intimate relationship, which contributes to promote the family and social harmony. Previous studies have shown that different degrees of intimacy have significant differences in brain imaging. Recently, a few of work has emerged to recognise intimacy automatically by using machine learning technique. Moreover, considering the temporal dynamic characteristics of intimacy relationship on neural mechanism, how to model spatio-temporal dynamics for intimacy prediction effectively is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method to explore deep spatial-temporal representations for intimacy prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (ACCRNN). Given the advantages of time-frequency resolution in complex neuronal activities analysis, this paper utilizes functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to analyse and infer to intimate relationship. We collect a fNIRS-based dataset for the analysis of intimate relationship. Forty-two-channel fNIRS signals are recorded from the 44 subjects' prefrontal cortex when they watched a total of 18 photos of lovers, friends and strangers for 30 seconds per photo. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the others in terms of accuracy with the precision of 96.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a hybrid deep architecture has been employed for fNIRS-based intimacy prediction.

Learning Group Activities from Skeletons without Individual Action Labels

Fabio Zappardino, Tiberio Uricchio, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Lean Pose Only for Group Activity Recognition

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To understand human behavior we must not just recognize individual actions but model possibly complex group activity and interactions. Hierarchical models obtain the best results in group activity recognition but require fine grained individual action annotations at the actor level. In this paper we show that using only skeletal data we can train a state-of-the art end-to-end system using only group activity labels at the sequence level. Our experiments show that models trained without individual action supervision perform poorly. On the other hand we show that pseudo-labels can be computed from any pre-trained feature extractor with comparable final performance. Finally our carefully designed lean pose only architecture shows highly competitive results versus more complex multimodal approaches even in the self-supervised variant.

Learnable Higher-Order Representation for Action Recognition

Jie Shao, Xiangyang Xue

Auto-TLDR; Learningable Higher-Order Operations for Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Video Recognition

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Capturing spatiotemporal dynamics is an essential topic in video recognition. In this paper, we present learnable higher-order operations as a generic family of building blocks for capturing spatiotemporal dynamics from RGB input video space. Similar to higher-order functions, the weights of higher-order operations are themselves derived from the data with learnable parameters. Classical architectures such as residual learning and network-in-network are first-order operations where weights are directly learned from the data. Higher-order operations make it easier to capture context-sensitive patterns, such as motion. Self-attention models are also higher-order operations, but the attention weights are mostly computed from an affine operation or dot product. The learnable higher-order operations can be more generic and flexible. Experimentally, we show that on the task of video recognition, our higher-order models can achieve results on par with or better than the existing state-of-the-art methods on Something-Something (V1 and V2), Kinetics and Charades datasets.

IPN Hand: A Video Dataset and Benchmark for Real-Time Continuous Hand Gesture Recognition

Gibran Benitez-Garcia, Jesus Olivares-Mercado, Gabriel Sanchez-Perez, Keiji Yanai

Auto-TLDR; IPN Hand: A Benchmark Dataset for Continuous Hand Gesture Recognition

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Continuous hand gesture recognition (HGR) is an essential part of human-computer interaction with a wide range of applications in the automotive sector, consumer electronics, home automation, and others. In recent years, accurate and efficient deep learning models have been proposed for HGR. However, in the research community, the current publicly available datasets lack real-world elements needed to build responsive and efficient HGR systems. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark dataset named IPN Hand with sufficient size, variation, and real-world elements able to train and evaluate deep neural networks. This dataset contains more than 4 000 gesture samples and 800 000 RGB frames from 50 distinct subjects. We design 13 different static and dynamic gestures focused on interaction with touchless screens. We especially consider the scenario when continuous gestures are performed without transition states, and when subjects perform natural movements with their hands as non-gesture actions. Gestures were collected from about 30 diverse scenes, with real-world variation in background and illumination. With our dataset, the performance of three 3D-CNN models is evaluated on the tasks of isolated and continuous real-time HGR. Furthermore, we analyze the possibility of increasing the recognition accuracy by adding multiple modalities derived from RGB frames, i.e., optical flow and semantic segmentation, while keeping the real-time performance of the 3D-CNN model. Our empirical study also provides a comparison with the publicly available nvGesture (NVIDIA) dataset. The experimental results show that the state-of-the-art ResNext-101 model decreases about 30% accuracy when using our real-world dataset, demonstrating that the IPN Hand dataset can be used as a benchmark, and may help the community to step forward in the continuous HGR.

AttendAffectNet: Self-Attention Based Networks for Predicting Affective Responses from Movies

Thi Phuong Thao Ha, Bt Balamurali, Herremans Dorien, Roig Gemma

Auto-TLDR; AttendAffectNet: A Self-Attention Based Network for Emotion Prediction from Movies

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In this work, we propose different variants of the self-attention based network for emotion prediction from movies, which we call AttendAffectNet. We take both audio and video into account and incorporate the relation among multiple modalities by applying self-attention mechanism in a novel manner into the extracted features for emotion prediction. We compare it to the typically temporal integration of the self-attention based model, which in our case, allows to capture the relation of temporal representations of the movie while considering the sequential dependencies of emotion responses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures on the extended COGNIMUSE dataset [1], [2] and the MediaEval 2016 Emotional Impact of Movies Task [3], which consist of movies with emotion annotations. Our results show that applying the self-attention mechanism on the different audio-visual features, rather than in the time domain, is more effective for emotion prediction. Our approach is also proven to outperform state-of-the-art models for emotion prediction.

DeepPear: Deep Pose Estimation and Action Recognition

Wen-Jiin Tsai, You-Ying Jhuang

Auto-TLDR; Human Action Recognition Using RGB Video Using 3D Human Pose and Appearance Features

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Human action recognition has been a popular issue recently because it can be applied in many applications such as intelligent surveillance systems, human-robot interaction, and autonomous vehicle control. Human action recognition using RGB video is a challenging task because the learning of actions is easily affected by the cluttered background. To cope with this problem, the proposed method estimates 3D human poses first which can help remove the cluttered background and focus on the human body. In addition to the human poses, the proposed method also utilizes appearance features nearby the predicted joints to make our action prediction context-aware. Instead of using 3D convolutional neural networks as many action recognition approaches did, the proposed method uses a two-stream architecture that aggregates the results from skeleton-based and appearance-based approaches to do action recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D which is a largescale dataset for human action recognition.

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

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

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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.

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

Mirco Planamente, Andrea Bottino, Barbara Caputo

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

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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.

Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

Nina Weng, Jiahao Wang, Annan Li, Yunhong Wang

Auto-TLDR; 2S-TCN: A Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

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In the field of facial attractiveness prediction, while deep models using static pictures have shown promising results, little attention is paid to dynamic facial information, which is proven to be influential by psychological studies. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of short video apps creates an enormous demand of facial attractiveness prediction from short video clips. In this paper, we target on the dynamic facial attractiveness prediction problem. To begin with, a large-scale video-based facial attractiveness prediction dataset (VFAP) with more than one thousand clips from TikTok is collected. A two-stream temporal convolutional network (2S-TCN) is then proposed to capture dynamic attractiveness feature from both facial appearance and landmarks. We employ attentive feature enhancement along with specially designed modality and temporal fusion strategies to better explore the temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on the proposed VFAP dataset demonstrate that 2S-TCN has a distinct advantage over the state-of-the-art static prediction methods.

Vertex Feature Encoding and Hierarchical Temporal Modeling in a Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Action Recognition

Konstantinos Papadopoulos, Enjie Ghorbel, Djamila Aouada, Bjorn Ottersten

Auto-TLDR; Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

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Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) have shown great performance in the context of skeleton-based action recognition. Nevertheless, ST-GCNs use raw skeleton data as vertex features. Such features have low dimensionality and might not be optimal for action discrimination. Moreover, a single layer of temporal convolution is used to model short-term temporal dependencies but can be insufficient for capturing both long-term. In this paper, we extend the Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for skeleton-based action recognition by introducing two novel modules, namely, the Graph Vertex Feature Encoder (GVFE) and the Dilated Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Network (DH-TCN). On the one hand, the GVFE module learns appropriate vertex features for action recognition by encoding raw skeleton data into a new feature space. On the other hand, the DH-TCN module is capable of capturing both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies using a hierarchical dilated convolutional network. Experiments have been conducted on the challenging NTU RGB-D 60, NTU RGB-D 120 and Kinetics datasets. The obtained results show that our method competes with state-of-the-art approaches while using a smaller number of layers and parameters; thus reducing the required training time and memory.

Context Visual Information-Based Deliberation Network for Video Captioning

Min Lu, Xueyong Li, Caihua Liu

Auto-TLDR; Context visual information-based deliberation network for video captioning

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Video captioning is to automatically and accurately generate a textual description for a video. The typical methods following the encoder-decoder architecture directly utilized hidden states to predict words. Nevertheless, these methods did not amend the inaccurate hidden states before feeding those states into word prediction. This led to a cascade of errors on generating word by word. In this paper, the context visual information-based deliberation network is proposed, abbreviated as CVI-DelNet. Its key idea is to introduce the deliberator into the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder-decoder firstly generates a raw hidden state sequence. Unlike the existing methods, the raw hidden state is no more directly used for word prediction but is fed into the deliberator to generate the refined hidden state. The words are then predicted according to the refined hidden states and the contextual visual features. Results on two datasets shows that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baselines.

Visual Oriented Encoder: Integrating Multimodal and Multi-Scale Contexts for Video Captioning

Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou

Auto-TLDR; Visual Oriented Encoder for Video Captioning

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Video captioning is a challenging task which aims at automatically generating a natural language description of a given video. Recent researches have shown that exploiting the intrinsic multi-modalities of videos significantly promotes captioning performance. However, how to integrate multi-modalities to generate effective semantic representations for video captioning is still an open issue. Some researchers proposed to learn multimodal features in parallel during the encoding stage. The downside of these methods lies in the neglect of the interaction among multi-modalities and their rich contextual information. In this study, inspired by the fact that visual contents are generally more important for comprehending videos, we propose a novel Visual Oriented Encoder (VOE) to integrate multimodal features in an interactive manner. Specifically, VOE is designed as a hierarchical structure, where bottom layers are utilized to extract multi-scale contexts from auxiliary modalities while the top layer is exploited to generate joint representations by considering both visual and contextual information. Following the encoder-decoder framework, we systematically develop a VOE-LSTM model and evaluate it on two mainstream benchmarks: MSVD and MSR-VTT. Experimental results show that the proposed VOE surpasses conventional encoders and our VOE-LSTM model achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Single View Learning in Action Recognition

Gaurvi Goyal, Nicoletta Noceti, Francesca Odone

Auto-TLDR; Cross-View Action Recognition Using Domain Adaptation for Knowledge Transfer

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Viewpoint is an essential aspect of how an action is visually perceived, with the motion appearing substantially different for some viewpoint pairs. Data driven action recognition algorithms compensate for this by including a variety of viewpoints in their training data, adding to the cost of data acquisition as well as training. We propose a novel methodology that leverages deeply pretrained features to learn actions from a single viewpoint using domain adaptation for knowledge transfer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this pipeline on 3 different datasets: IXMAS, MoCA and NTU RGBD+, and compare with both classical and deep learning methods. Our method requires low training data and demonstrates unparalleled cross-view action recognition accuracies for single view learning.

RMS-Net: Regression and Masking for Soccer Event Spotting

Matteo Tomei, Lorenzo Baraldi, Simone Calderara, Simone Bronzin, Rita Cucchiara

Auto-TLDR; An Action Spotting Network for Soccer Videos

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The recently proposed action spotting task consists in finding the exact timestamp in which an event occurs. This task fits particularly well for soccer videos, where events correspond to salient actions strictly defined by soccer rules (a goal occurs when the ball crosses the goal line). In this paper, we devise a lightweight and modular network for action spotting, which can simultaneously predict the event label and its temporal offset using the same underlying features. We enrich our model with two training strategies: the first one for data balancing and uniform sampling, the second for masking ambiguous frames and keeping the most discriminative visual cues. When tested on the SoccerNet dataset and using standard features, our full proposal exceeds the current state of the art by 3 Average-mAP points. Additionally, it reaches a gain of more than 10 Average-mAP points on the test set when fine-tuned in combination with a strong 2D backbone.

Vision-Based Multi-Modal Framework for Action Recognition

Djamila Romaissa Beddiar, Mourad Oussalah, Brahim Nini

Auto-TLDR; Multi-modal Framework for Human Activity Recognition Using RGB, Depth and Skeleton Data

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Human activity recognition plays a central role in the development of intelligent systems for video surveillance, public security, health care and home monitoring, where detection and recognition of activities can improve the quality of life and security of humans. Typically, automated, intuitive and real-time systems are required to recognize human activities and identify accurately unusual behaviors in order to prevent dangerous situations. In this work, we explore the combination of three modalities (RGB, depth and skeleton data) to design a robust multi-modal framework for vision-based human activity recognition. Especially, spatial information, body shape/posture and temporal evolution of actions are highlighted using illustrative representations obtained from a combination of dynamic RGB images, dynamic depth images and skeleton data representations. Therefore, each video is represented with three images that summarize the ongoing action. Our framework takes advantage of transfer learning from pre trained models to extract significant features from these newly created images. Next, we fuse extracted features using Canonical Correlation Analysis and train a Long Short-Term Memory network to classify actions from visual descriptive images. Experimental results demonstrated the reliability of our feature-fusion framework that allows us to capture highly significant features and enables us to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the public UTD-MHAD and NTU RGB+D datasets.

Recurrent Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Guangming Zhu, Lu Yang, Liang Zhang, Peiyi Shen, Juan Song

Auto-TLDR; Recurrent Graph Convolutional Network for Human Action Recognition

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Human action recognition is one of the challenging and active research fields due to its wide applications. Recently, graph convolutions for skeleton-based action recognition have attracted much attention. Generally, the adjacency matrices of the graph are fixed to the hand-crafted physical connectivity of the human joints, or learned adaptively via deep learining. The hand-crafted or learned adjacency matrices are fixed when processing each frame of an action sequence. However, the interactions of different subsets of joints may play a core role at different phases of an action. Therefore, it is reasonable to evolve the graph topology with time. In this paper, a recurrent graph convolution is proposed, in which the graph topology is evolved via a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The proposed recurrent graph convolutional network (R-GCN) can recurrently learn the data-dependent graph topologies for different layers, different time steps and different kinds of actions. Experimental results on the NTU RGB+D and Kinetics-Skeleton datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed R-GCN.

Precise Temporal Action Localization with Quantified Temporal Structure of Actions

Chongkai Lu, Ruimin Li, Hong Fu, Bin Fu, Yihao Wang, Wai Lun Lo, Zheru Chi

Auto-TLDR; Action progression networks for temporal action detection

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Existing temporal action detection algorithms cannot distinguish complete and incomplete actions while this property is essential in many applications. To tackle this challenge, we proposed the action progression networks (APN), a novel model that predicts action progression of video frames with continuous numbers. Using the progression sequence of test video, on the top of the APN, a complete action searching algorithm (CAS) was designed to detect complete actions only. With the usage of frame-level fine-grained temporal structure modeling and detecting actions according to their whole temporal context, our framework can locate actions precisely and is good at avoiding incomplete action detection. We evaluated our framework on a new dataset (DFMAD-70) collected by ourselves which contains both complete and incomplete actions. Our framework got good temporal localization results with 95.77% average precision when the IoU threshold is 0.5. On the benchmark THUMOS14, an incomplete-ignostic dataset, our framework still obtain competitive performance. The code is available online at https://github.com/MakeCent/Action-Progression-Network

2D Deep Video Capsule Network with Temporal Shift for Action Recognition

Théo Voillemin, Hazem Wannous, Jean-Philippe Vandeborre

Auto-TLDR; Temporal Shift Module over Capsule Network for Action Recognition in Continuous Videos

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Action recognition in continuous video streams is a growing field since the past few years. Deep learning techniques and in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieved good results in this topic. However, intrinsic CNNs limitations begin to cap the results since 2D CNN cannot capture temporal information and 3D CNN are to much resource demanding for real-time applications. Capsule Network, evolution of CNN, already proves its interesting benefits on small and low informational datasets like MNIST but yet its true potential has not emerged. In this paper we tackle the action recognition problem by proposing a new architecture combining Temporal Shift module over deep Capsule Network. Temporal Shift module permits us to insert temporal information over 2D Capsule Network with a zero computational cost to conserve the lightness of 2D capsules and their ability to connect spatial features. Our proposed approach outperforms or brings near state-of-the-art results on color and depth information on public datasets like First Person Hand Action and DHG 14/28 with a number of parameters 10 to 40 times less than existing approaches.

Late Fusion of Bayesian and Convolutional Models for Action Recognition

Camille Maurice, Francisco Madrigal, Frederic Lerasle

Auto-TLDR; Fusion of Deep Neural Network and Bayesian-based Approach for Temporal Action Recognition

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The activities we do in our daily-life are generally carried out as a succession of atomic actions, following a logical order. During a video sequence, actions usually follow a logical order. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach resulting from the fusion of a deep learning neural network with a Bayesian-based approach. The latter models human-object interactions and transition between actions. The key idea is to combine both approaches in the final prediction. We validate our strategy in two public datasets: CAD-120 and Watch-n-Patch. We show that our fusion approach yields performance gains in accuracy of respectively +4\% and +6\% over a baseline approach. Temporal action recognition performances are clearly improved by the fusion, especially when classes are imbalanced.

SAT-Net: Self-Attention and Temporal Fusion for Facial Action Unit Detection

Zhihua Li, Zheng Zhang, Lijun Yin

Auto-TLDR; Temporal Fusion and Self-Attention Network for Facial Action Unit Detection

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Research on facial action unit detection has shown remarkable performances by using deep spatial learning models in recent years, however, it is far from reaching its full capacity in learning due to the lack of use of temporal information of AUs across time. Since the AU occurrence in one frame is highly likely related to previous frames in a temporal sequence, exploring temporal correlation of AUs across frames becomes a key motivation of this work. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal fusion and AU-supervised self-attention network (a so-called SAT-Net) to address the AU detection problem. First of all, we input the deep features of a sequence into a convolutional LSTM network and fuse the previous temporal information into the feature map of the last frame, and continue to learn the AU occurrence. Second, considering the AU detection problem is a multi-label classification problem that individual label depends only on certain facial areas, we propose a new self-learned attention mask by focusing the detection of each AU on parts of facial areas through the learning of individual attention mask for each AU, thus increasing the AU independence without the loss of any spatial relations. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves better results of AU detection over the state-of-the-arts on two benchmark databases (BP4D and DISFA).

Learning Knowledge-Rich Sequential Model for Planar Homography Estimation in Aerial Video

Pu Li, Xiaobai Liu

Auto-TLDR; Sequential Estimation of Planar Homographic Transformations over Aerial Videos

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This paper presents an unsupervised approach that leverages raw aerial videos to learn to estimate planar homographic transformation between consecutive video frames. Previous learning-based estimators work on pairs of images to estimate their planar homographic transformations but suffer from severe over-fitting issues, especially when applying over aerial videos. To address this concern, we develop a sequential estimator that directly processes a sequence of video frames and estimates their pairwise planar homographic transformations in batches. We also incorporate a set of spatial-temporal knowledge to regularize the learning of such a sequence-to-sequence model. We collect a set of challenging aerial videos and compare the proposed method to the alternative algorithms. Empirical studies suggest that our sequential model achieves significant improvement over alternative image-based methods and the knowledge-rich regularization further boosts our system performance. Our codes and dataset could be found at https://github.com/Paul-LiPu/DeepVideoHomography

Audio-Video Detection of the Active Speaker in Meetings

Francisco Madrigal, Frederic Lerasle, Lionel Pibre, Isabelle Ferrané

Auto-TLDR; Active Speaker Detection with Visual and Contextual Information from Meeting Context

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Meetings are a common activity that provides certain challenges when creating systems that assist them. Such is the case of the Active speaker detection, which can provide useful information for human interaction modeling, or human-robot interaction. Active speaker detection is mostly done using speech, however, certain visual and contextual information can provide additional insights. In this paper we propose an active speaker detection framework that integrates audiovisual features with social information, from the meeting context. Visual cue is processed using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that captures the spatio-temporal relationships. We analyze several CNN architectures with both cues: raw pixels (RGB images) and motion (estimated with optical flow). Contextual reasoning is done with an original methodology, based on the gaze of all participants. We evaluate our proposal with a public \textcolor{black}{benchmark} in state-of-art: AMI corpus. We show how the addition of visual and context information improves the performance of the active speaker detection.

PHNet: Parasite-Host Network for Video Crowd Counting

Shiqiao Meng, Jiajie Li, Weiwei Guo, Jinfeng Jiang, Lai Ye

Auto-TLDR; PHNet: A Parasite-Host Network for Video Crowd Counting

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Crowd counting plays an increasingly important role in public security. Recently, many crowd counting methods for a single image have been proposed but few studies have focused on using temporal information from image sequences of videos to improve prediction performance. In the existing methods using videos for crowd estimation, temporal features and spatial features are modeled jointly for the prediction, which makes the model less efficient in extracting spatiotemporal features and difficult to improve the performance of predictions. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a Parasite-Host Network(PHNet) which is composed of Parasite branch and Host branch to extract temporal features and spatial features respectively. To specifically extract the transform features in the time domain, we propose a novel architecture termed as “Relational Extractor”(RE) which models the multiplicative interaction features of adjacent frames. In addition, the Host branch extracts the spatial features from a current frame which can be replaced with any model that uses a single image for the prediction. We conducted experiments by using our PHNet on four video crowd counting benchmarks: Venice,UCSD,FDST and CrowdFlow. Experimental results show that PHnet achieves superior performance on these four datasets to the state-of-the-art methods.

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Using a Two-Step Feature Fusion Strategy

Hong Liu, Wanlu Xu, Bing Yang

Auto-TLDR; A Two-Step Feature Fusion Network for Speech Recognition

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Lip-reading methods and fusion strategy are crucial for audio-visual speech recognition. In recent years, most approaches involve two separate audio and visual streams with early or late fusion strategies. Such a single-stage fusion method may fail to guarantee the integrity and representativeness of fusion information simultaneously. This paper extends a traditional single-stage fusion network to a two-step feature fusion network by adding an audio-visual early feature fusion (AV-EFF) stream to the baseline model. This method can learn the fusion information of different stages, preserving the original features as much as possible and ensuring the independence of different features. Besides, to capture long-range dependencies of video information, a non-local block is added to the feature extraction part of the visual stream (NL-Visual) to obtain the long-term spatio-temporal features. Experimental results on the two largest public datasets in English (LRW) and Mandarin (LRW-1000) demonstrate our method is superior to other state-of-the-art methods.

Motion Complementary Network for Efficient Action Recognition

Ke Cheng, Yifan Zhang, Chenghua Li, Jian Cheng, Hanqing Lu

Auto-TLDR; Efficient Motion Complementary Network for Action Recognition

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Both two-stream ConvNet and 3D ConvNet are widely used in action recognition. However, both methods are not efficient for deployment: calculating optical flow is very slow, while 3D convolution is computationally expensive. Our key insight is that the motion information from optical flow maps is complementary to the motion information from 3D ConvNet. Instead of simply combining these two methods, we propose two novel techniques to enhance the performance with less computational cost: \textit{fixed-motion-accumulation} and \textit{balanced-motion-policy}. With these two techniques, we propose a novel framework called Efficient Motion Complementary Network(EMC-Net) that enjoys both high efficiency and high performance. We conduct extensive experiments on Kinetics, UCF101, and Jester datasets. We achieve notably higher performance while consuming 4.7$\times$ less computation than I3D, 11.6$\times$ less computation than ECO, 17.8$\times$ less computation than R(2+1)D. On Kinetics dataset, we achieve 2.6\% better performance than the recent proposed TSM with 1.4$\times$ fewer FLOPs and 10ms faster on K80 GPU.

Identity-Aware Facial Expression Recognition in Compressed Video

Xiaofeng Liu, Linghao Jin, Xu Han, Jun Lu, Jonghye Woo, Jane You

Auto-TLDR; Exploring Facial Expression Representation in Compressed Video with Mutual Information Minimization

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This paper targets to explore the inter-subject variations eliminated facial expression representation in the compressed video domain. Most of the previous methods process the RGB images of a sequence, while the off-the-shelf and valuable expression-related muscle movement already embedded in the compression format. In the up to two orders of magnitude compressed domain, we can explicitly infer the expression from the residual frames and possible to extract identity factors from the I frame with a pre-trained face recognition network. By enforcing the marginal independent of them, the expression feature is expected to be purer for the expression and be robust to identity shifts. Specifically, we propose a novel collaborative min-min game for mutual information (MI) minimization in latent space. We do not need the identity label or multiple expression samples from the same person for identity elimination. Moreover, when the apex frame is annotated in the dataset, the complementary constraint can be further added to regularize the feature-level game. In testing, only the compressed residual frames are required to achieve expression prediction. Our solution can achieve comparable or better performance than the recent decoded image based methods on the typical FER benchmarks with about 3$\times$ faster inference with compressed data.

A Prototype-Based Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Framework for Hand Gesture Recognition

Jinting Wu, Yujia Zhang, Xiao-Guang Zhao

Auto-TLDR; Generalized Zero-Shot Learning for Hand Gesture Recognition

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Hand gesture recognition plays a significant role in human-computer interaction for understanding various human gestures and their intent. However, most prior works can only recognize gestures of limited labeled classes and fail to adapt to new categories. The task of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) for hand gesture recognition aims to address the above issue by leveraging semantic representations and detecting both seen and unseen class samples. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end prototype-based GZSL framework for hand gesture recognition which consists of two branches. The first branch is a prototype-based detector that learns gesture representations and determines whether an input sample belongs to a seen or unseen category. The second branch is a zero-shot label predictor which takes the features of unseen classes as input and outputs predictions through a learned mapping mechanism between the feature and the semantic space. We further establish a hand gesture dataset that specifically targets this GZSL task, and comprehensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on recognizingQuestionnaire both seen and unseen gestures.

Pose-Aware Multi-Feature Fusion Network for Driver Distraction Recognition

Mingyan Wu, Xi Zhang, Linlin Shen, Hang Yu

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Feature Fusion Network for Distracted Driving Detection using Pose Estimation

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Traffic accidents caused by distracted driving have gradually increased in recent years. In this work, we propose a novel multi-feature fusion network based on pose estimation, for image based distracted driving detection. Since hand is the most important part of driver to infer the distracted actions, our proposed method firstly detects hands using the human body posture information. In addition to the features extracted from the whole image, our network also include the important information of hand and human body posture. The global feature, hand and pose features are finally fused by weighted combination of probability vectors and concatenation of feature maps. The experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on our own SZ Bus Driver dataset and the public AUC Distracted Driver dataset.

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

Qianhui Men, Edmond S. L. Ho, Shum Hubert P. H., Howard Leung

Auto-TLDR; Two-Stream Recurrent Neural Network for Human-Human Interaction Recognition

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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.