Congqi Cao — Page 2

arXiv2020

Few-shot Action Recognition with Implicit Temporal Alignment and Pair Similarity Optimization

Few-shot learning aims to recognize instances from novel classes with few labeled samples, which has great value in research and application. Although there has been a lot of work in this area recently, most of the existing work is based on image classification tasks. Video-based few-shot action recognition has not been explored well and remains challenging: 1) the differences of implementation details among different papers make a fair comparison difficult; 2) the wide variations and misalignment of temporal sequences make the video-level similarity comparison difficult; 3) the scarcity of labeled data makes the optimization difficult. To solve these problems, this paper presents 1) a specific setting to evaluate the performance of few-shot action recognition algorithms; 2) an implicit sequence-alignment algorithm for better video-level similarity comparison; 3) an advanced loss for few-shot learning to optimize pair similarity with limited data. Specifically, we propose a novel few-shot action recognition framework that uses long short-term memory following 3D convolutional layers for sequence modeling and alignment. Circle loss is introduced to maximize the within-class similarity and minimize the between-class similarity flexibly towards a more definite convergence target. Instead of using random or ambiguous experimental settings, we set a concrete criterion analogous to the standard image-based few-shot learning setting for few-shot action recognition evaluation. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Body Joint guided 3D Deep Convolutional Descriptors for Action Recognition

Three dimensional convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs) have been established as a powerful tool to simultaneously learn features from both spatial and temporal dimensions, which is suitable to be applied to video-based action recognition. In this work, we propose not to directly use the activations of fully-connected layers of a 3D CNN as the video feature, but to use selective convolutional layer activations to form a discriminative descriptor for video. It pools the feature on the convolutional layers under the guidance of body joint positions. Two schemes of mapping body joints into convolutional feature maps for pooling are discussed. The body joint positions can be obtained from any off-the-shelf skeleton estimation algorithm. The helpfulness of the body joint guided feature pooling with inaccurate skeleton estimation is systematically evaluated. To make it end-to-end and do not rely on any sophisticated body joint detection algorithm, we further propose a two-stream bilinear model which can learn the guidance from the body joints and capture the spatio-temporal features simultaneously. In this model, the body joint guided feature pooling is conveniently formulated as a bilinear product operation. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of body joint guided pooling which achieves promising performance.

cs.CV↗