Extracting temporal and representation features efficiently plays a pivotal role in understanding visual sequence information. To deal with this, we propose a new recurrent neural framework that can be stacked deep effectively. There are mainly two novel designs in our deep RNN framework: one is a new RNN module called Context Bridge Module (CBM) which splits the information flowing along the sequence (temporal direction) and along depth (spatial representation direction), making it easier to train when building deep by balancing these two directions; the other is the Overlap Coherence Training Scheme that reduces the training complexity for long visual sequential tasks on account of the limitation of computing resources. We provide empirical evidence to show that our deep RNN framework is easy to optimize and can gain accuracy from the increased depth on several visual sequence problems. On these tasks, we evaluate our deep RNN framework with 15 layers, 7* than conventional RNN networks, but it is still easy to train. Our deep framework achieves more than 11% relative improvements over shallow RNN models on Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51 for video classification. For auxiliary annotation, after replacing the shallow RNN part of Polygon-RNN with our 15-layer deep CBM, the performance improves by 14.7%. For video future prediction, our deep RNN improves the state-of-the-art shallow model's performance by 2.4% on PSNR and SSIM. The code and trained models are published accompanied by this paper: https://github.com/BoPang1996/Deep-RNN-Framework.
The non-local module is designed for capturing long-range spatio-temporal dependencies in images and videos. Although having shown excellent performance, it lacks the mechanism to model the interactions between positions across channels, which are of vital importance in recognizing fine-grained objects and actions. To address this limitation, we generalize the non-local module and take the correlations between the positions of any two channels into account. This extension utilizes the compact representation for multiple kernel functions with Taylor expansion that makes the generalized non-local module in a fast and low-complexity computation flow. Moreover, we implement our generalized non-local method within channel groups to ease the optimization. Experimental results illustrate the clear-cut improvements and practical applicability of the generalized non-local module on both fine-grained object recognition and video classification. Code is available at: https://github.com/KaiyuYue/cgnl-network.pytorch.
In this paper, we propose a convolutional layer inspired by optical flow algorithms to learn motion representations. Our representation flow layer is a fully-differentiable layer designed to capture the `flow' of any representation channel within a convolutional neural network for action recognition. Its parameters for iterative flow optimization are learned in an end-to-end fashion together with the other CNN model parameters, maximizing the action recognition performance. Furthermore, we newly introduce the concept of learning `flow of flow' representations by stacking multiple representation flow layers. We conducted extensive experimental evaluations, confirming its advantages over previous recognition models using traditional optical flows in both computational speed and performance. Code/models available here: https://piergiaj.github.io/rep-flow-site/
In real world scenarios, model accuracy is hardly the only factor to consider. Large models consume more memory and are computationally more intensive, which makes them difficult to train and to deploy, especially on mobile devices. In this paper, we build on recent results at the crossroads of Linear Algebra and Deep Learning which demonstrate how imposing a structure on large weight matrices can be used to reduce the size of the model. We propose very compact models for video classification based on state-of-the-art network architectures such as Deep Bag-of-Frames, NetVLAD and NetFisherVectors. We then conduct thorough experiments using the large YouTube-8M video classification dataset. As we will show, the circulant DBoF embedding achieves an excellent trade-off between size and accuracy.
We introduce modifications to state-of-the-art approaches to aggregating local video descriptors by using attention mechanisms and function approximations. Rather than using ensembles of existing architectures, we provide an insight on creating new architectures. We demonstrate our solutions in the "The 2nd YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge", by using frame-level video and audio descriptors. We obtain testing accuracy similar to the state of the art, while meeting budget constraints, and touch upon strategies to improve the state of the art. Model implementations are available in https://github.com/pomonam/LearnablePoolingMethods.
We investigate architectures of discriminatively trained deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) for action recognition in video. The challenge is to capture the complementary information on appearance from still frames and motion between frames. We also aim to generalise the best performing hand-crafted features within a data-driven learning framework. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream ConvNet architecture which incorporates spatial and temporal networks. Second, we demonstrate that a ConvNet trained on multi-frame dense optical flow is able to achieve very good performance in spite of limited training data. Finally, we show that multi-task learning, applied to two different action classification datasets, can be used to increase the amount of training data and improve the performance on both. Our architecture is trained and evaluated on the standard video actions benchmarks of UCF-101 and HMDB-51, where it is competitive with the state of the art. It also exceeds by a large margin previous attempts to use deep nets for video classification.
One of the challenges in modeling cognitive events from electroencephalogram (EEG) data is finding representations that are invariant to inter- and intra-subject differences, as well as to inherent noise associated with such data. Herein, we propose a novel approach for learning such representations from multi-channel EEG time-series, and demonstrate its advantages in the context of mental load classification task. First, we transform EEG activities into a sequence of topology-preserving multi-spectral images, as opposed to standard EEG analysis techniques that ignore such spatial information. Next, we train a deep recurrent-convolutional network inspired by state-of-the-art video classification to learn robust representations from the sequence of images. The proposed approach is designed to preserve the spatial, spectral, and temporal structure of EEG which leads to finding features that are less sensitive to variations and distortions within each dimension. Empirical evaluation on the cognitive load classification task demonstrated significant improvements in classification accuracy over current state-of-the-art approaches in this field.
Current state-of-the-art human activity recognition is focused on the classification of temporally trimmed videos in which only one action occurs per frame. We propose a simple, yet effective, method for the temporal detection of activities in temporally untrimmed videos with the help of untrimmed classification. Firstly, our model predicts the top k labels for each untrimmed video by analysing global video-level features. Secondly, frame-level binary classification is combined with dynamic programming to generate the temporally trimmed activity proposals. Finally, each proposal is assigned a label based on the global label, and scored with the score of the temporal activity proposal and the global score. Ultimately, we show that untrimmed video classification models can be used as stepping stone for temporal detection.
This paper presents the method that underlies our submission to the untrimmed video classification task of ActivityNet Challenge 2016. We follow the basic pipeline of temporal segment networks and further raise the performance via a number of other techniques. Specifically, we use the latest deep model architecture, e.g., ResNet and Inception V3, and introduce new aggregation schemes (top-k and attention-weighted pooling). Additionally, we incorporate the audio as a complementary channel, extracting relevant information via a CNN applied to the spectrograms. With these techniques, we derive an ensemble of deep models, which, together, attains a high classification accuracy (mAP $93.23\%$) on the testing set and secured the first place in the challenge.
Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.
Deep convolutional networks have achieved great success for image recognition. However, for action recognition in videos, their advantage over traditional methods is not so evident. We present a general and flexible video-level framework for learning action models in videos. This method, called temporal segment network (TSN), aims to model long-range temporal structures with a new segment-based sampling and aggregation module. This unique design enables our TSN to efficiently learn action models by using the whole action videos. The learned models could be easily adapted for action recognition in both trimmed and untrimmed videos with simple average pooling and multi-scale temporal window integration, respectively. We also study a series of good practices for the instantiation of TSN framework given limited training samples. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on four challenging action recognition benchmarks: HMDB51 (71.0%), UCF101 (94.9%), THUMOS14 (80.1%), and ActivityNet v1.2 (89.6%). Using the proposed RGB difference for motion models, our method can still achieve competitive accuracy on UCF101 (91.0%) while running at 340 FPS. Furthermore, based on the temporal segment networks, we won the video classification track at the ActivityNet challenge 2016 among 24 teams, which demonstrates the effectiveness of TSN and the proposed good practices.
This article describes the final solution of team monkeytyping, who finished in second place in the YouTube-8M video understanding challenge. The dataset used in this challenge is a large-scale benchmark for multi-label video classification. We extend the work in [1] and propose several improvements for frame sequence modeling. We propose a network structure called Chaining that can better capture the interactions between labels. Also, we report our approaches in dealing with multi-scale information and attention pooling. In addition, We find that using the output of model ensemble as a side target in training can boost single model performance. We report our experiments in bagging, boosting, cascade, and stacking, and propose a stacking algorithm called attention weighted stacking. Our final submission is an ensemble that consists of 74 sub models, all of which are listed in the appendix.
The Recurrent Neural Networks and their variants have shown promising performances in sequence modeling tasks such as Natural Language Processing. These models, however, turn out to be impractical and difficult to train when exposed to very high-dimensional inputs due to the large input-to-hidden weight matrix. This may have prevented RNNs' large-scale application in tasks that involve very high input dimensions such as video modeling; current approaches reduce the input dimensions using various feature extractors. To address this challenge, we propose a new, more general and efficient approach by factorizing the input-to-hidden weight matrix using Tensor-Train decomposition which is trained simultaneously with the weights themselves. We test our model on classification tasks using multiple real-world video datasets and achieve competitive performances with state-of-the-art models, even though our model architecture is orders of magnitude less complex. We believe that the proposed approach provides a novel and fundamental building block for modeling high-dimensional sequential data with RNN architectures and opens up many possibilities to transfer the expressive and advanced architectures from other domains such as NLP to modeling high-dimensional sequential data.
The YouTube-8M video classification challenge requires teams to classify 0.7 million videos into one or more of 4,716 classes. In this Kaggle competition, we placed in the top 3% out of 650 participants using released video and audio features. Beyond that, we extend the original competition by including text information in the classification, making this a truly multi-modal approach with vision, audio and text. The newly introduced text data is termed as YouTube-8M-Text. We present a classification framework for the joint use of text, visual and audio features, and conduct an extensive set of experiments to quantify the benefit that this additional mode brings. The inclusion of text yields state-of-the-art results, e.g. 86.7% GAP on the YouTube-8M-Text validation dataset.
This paper introduces the system we developed for the Youtube-8M Video Understanding Challenge, in which a large-scale benchmark dataset was used for multi-label video classification. The proposed framework contains hierarchical deep architecture, including the frame-level sequence modeling part and the video-level classification part. In the frame-level sequence modelling part, we explore a set of methods including Pooling-LSTM (PLSTM), Hierarchical-LSTM (HLSTM), Random-LSTM (RLSTM) in order to address the problem of large amount of frames in a video. We also introduce two attention pooling methods, single attention pooling (ATT) and multiply attention pooling (Multi-ATT) so that we can pay more attention to the informative frames in a video and ignore the useless frames. In the video-level classification part, two methods are proposed to increase the classification performance, i.e. Hierarchical-Mixture-of-Experts (HMoE) and Classifier Chains (CC). Our final submission is an ensemble consisting of 18 sub-models. In terms of the official evaluation metric Global Average Precision (GAP) at 20, our best submission achieves 0.84346 on the public 50% of test dataset and 0.84333 on the private 50% of test data.
YouTube-8M is the largest video dataset for multi-label video classification. In order to tackle the multi-label classification on this challenging dataset, it is necessary to solve several issues such as temporal modeling of videos, label imbalances, and correlations between labels. We develop a deep neural network model, which consists of four components: the frame encoder, the classification layer, the label processing layer, and the loss function. We introduce our newly proposed methods and discusses how existing models operate in the YouTube-8M Classification Task, what insights they have, and why they succeed (or fail) to achieve good performance. Most of the models we proposed are very high compared to the baseline models, and the ensemble of the models we used is 8th in the Kaggle Competition.
In this paper, we present our solution to Google YouTube-8M Video Classification Challenge 2017. We leveraged both video-level and frame-level features in the submission. For video-level classification, we simply used a 200-mixture Mixture of Experts (MoE) layer, which achieves GAP 0.802 on the validation set with a single model. For frame-level classification, we utilized several variants of recurrent neural networks, sequence aggregation with attention mechanism and 1D convolutional models. We achieved GAP 0.8408 on the private testing set with the ensemble model. The source code of our models can be found in \url{https://github.com/ffmpbgrnn/yt8m}.
We took part in the YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge hosted on Kaggle, and achieved the 10th place within less than one month's time. In this paper, we present an extensive analysis and solution to the underlying machine-learning problem based on frame-level data, where major challenges are identified and corresponding preliminary methods are proposed. It's noteworthy that, with merely the proposed strategies and uniformly-averaging multi-crop ensemble was it sufficient for us to reach our ranking. We also report the methods we believe to be promising but didn't have enough time to train to convergence. We hope this paper could serve, to some extent, as a review and guideline of the YouTube-8M multi-label video classification benchmark, inspiring future attempts and research.
The work in this paper is driven by the question how to exploit the temporal cues available in videos for their accurate classification, and for human action recognition in particular? Thus far, the vision community has focused on spatio-temporal approaches with fixed temporal convolution kernel depths. We introduce a new temporal layer that models variable temporal convolution kernel depths. We embed this new temporal layer in our proposed 3D CNN. We extend the DenseNet architecture - which normally is 2D - with 3D filters and pooling kernels. We name our proposed video convolutional network `Temporal 3D ConvNet'~(T3D) and its new temporal layer `Temporal Transition Layer'~(TTL). Our experiments show that T3D outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on the HMDB51, UCF101 and Kinetics datasets. The other issue in training 3D ConvNets is about training them from scratch with a huge labeled dataset to get a reasonable performance. So the knowledge learned in 2D ConvNets is completely ignored. Another contribution in this work is a simple and effective technique to transfer knowledge from a pre-trained 2D CNN to a randomly initialized 3D CNN for a stable weight initialization. This allows us to significantly reduce the number of training samples for 3D CNNs. Thus, by finetuning this network, we beat the performance of generic and recent methods in 3D CNNs, which were trained on large video datasets, e.g. Sports-1M, and finetuned on the target datasets, e.g. HMDB51/UCF101. The T3D codes will be released
Recently, substantial research effort has focused on how to apply CNNs or RNNs to better extract temporal patterns from videos, so as to improve the accuracy of video classification. In this paper, however, we show that temporal information, especially longer-term patterns, may not be necessary to achieve competitive results on common video classification datasets. We investigate the potential of a purely attention based local feature integration. Accounting for the characteristics of such features in video classification, we propose a local feature integration framework based on attention clusters, and introduce a shifting operation to capture more diverse signals. We carefully analyze and compare the effect of different attention mechanisms, cluster sizes, and the use of the shifting operation, and also investigate the combination of attention clusters for multimodal integration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on three real-world video classification datasets. Our model achieves competitive results across all of these. In particular, on the large-scale Kinetics dataset, our framework obtains an excellent single model accuracy of 79.4% in terms of the top-1 and 94.0% in terms of the top-5 accuracy on the validation set. The attention clusters are the backbone of our winner solution at ActivityNet Kinetics Challenge 2017. Code and models will be released soon.