arXiv subjects

Yu Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Kong.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Learning of Global Objective for Network Flow in Multi-Object Tracking

This paper concerns the problem of multi-object tracking based on the min-cost flow (MCF) formulation, which is conventionally studied as an instance of linear program. Given its computationally tractable inference, the success of MCF tracking largely relies on the learned cost function of underlying linear program. Most previous studies focus on learning the cost function by only taking into account two frames during training, therefore the learned cost function is sub-optimal for MCF where a multi-frame data association must be considered during inference. In order to address this problem, in this paper we propose a novel differentiable framework that ties training and inference together during learning by solving a bi-level optimization problem, where the lower-level solves a linear program and the upper-level contains a loss function that incorporates global tracking result. By back-propagating the loss through differentiable layers via gradient descent, the globally parameterized cost function is explicitly learned and regularized. With this approach, we are able to learn a better objective for global MCF tracking. As a result, we achieve competitive performances compared to the current state-of-the-art methods on the popular multi-object tracking benchmarks such as MOT16, MOT17 and MOT20.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

OpenTAL: Towards Open Set Temporal Action Localization

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) has experienced remarkable success under the supervised learning paradigm. However, existing TAL methods are rooted in the closed set assumption, which cannot handle the inevitable unknown actions in open-world scenarios. In this paper, we, for the first time, step toward the Open Set TAL (OSTAL) problem and propose a general framework OpenTAL based on Evidential Deep Learning (EDL). Specifically, the OpenTAL consists of uncertainty-aware action classification, actionness prediction, and temporal location regression. With the proposed importance-balanced EDL method, classification uncertainty is learned by collecting categorical evidence majorly from important samples. To distinguish the unknown actions from background video frames, the actionness is learned by the positive-unlabeled learning. The classification uncertainty is further calibrated by leveraging the guidance from the temporal localization quality. The OpenTAL is general to enable existing TAL models for open set scenarios, and experimental results on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3 benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method. The code and pre-trained models are released at https://www.rit.edu/actionlab/opental.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Human Action Recognition and Prediction: A Survey

Derived from rapid advances in computer vision and machine learning, video analysis tasks have been moving from inferring the present state to predicting the future state. Vision-based action recognition and prediction from videos are such tasks, where action recognition is to infer human actions (present state) based upon complete action executions, and action prediction to predict human actions (future state) based upon incomplete action executions. These two tasks have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as visual surveillance, autonomous driving vehicle, entertainment, and video retrieval, etc. Many attempts have been devoted in the last a few decades in order to build a robust and effective framework for action recognition and prediction. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in action recognition and prediction. Existing models, popular algorithms, technical difficulties, popular action databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

An Eye for an Eye: Defending against Gradient-based Attacks with Gradients

Deep learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In particular, gradient-based attacks have demonstrated high success rates recently. The gradient measures how each image pixel affects the model output, which contains critical information for generating malicious perturbations. In this paper, we show that the gradients can also be exploited as a powerful weapon to defend against adversarial attacks. By using both gradient maps and adversarial images as inputs, we propose a Two-stream Restoration Network (TRN) to restore the adversarial images. To optimally restore the perturbed images with two streams of inputs, a Gradient Map Estimation Mechanism is proposed to estimate the gradients of adversarial images, and a Fusion Block is designed in TRN to explore and fuse the information in two streams. Once trained, our TRN can defend against a wide range of attack methods without significantly degrading the performance of benign inputs. Also, our method is generalizable, scalable, and hard to bypass. Experimental results on CIFAR10, SVHN, and Fashion MNIST demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Adversarial Memory Networks for Action Prediction

Action prediction aims to infer the forthcoming human action with partially-observed videos, which is a challenging task due to the limited information underlying early observations. Existing methods mainly adopt a reconstruction strategy to handle this task, expecting to learn a single mapping function from partial observations to full videos to facilitate the prediction process. In this study, we propose adversarial memory networks (AMemNet) to generate the "full video" feature conditioning on a partial video query from two new aspects. Firstly, a key-value structured memory generator is designed to memorize different partial videos as key memories and dynamically write full videos in value memories with gating mechanism and querying attention. Secondly, we develop a class-aware discriminator to guide the memory generator to deliver not only realistic but also discriminative full video features upon adversarial training. The final prediction result of AMemNet is given by late fusion over RGB and optical flow streams. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark video datasets, UCF-101 and HMDB51, are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AMemNet model over state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Gradient Frequency Modulation for Visually Explaining Video Understanding Models

In many applications, it is essential to understand why a machine learning model makes the decisions it does, but this is inhibited by the black-box nature of state-of-the-art neural networks. Because of this, increasing attention has been paid to explainability in deep learning, including in the area of video understanding. Due to the temporal dimension of video data, the main challenge of explaining a video action recognition model is to produce spatiotemporally consistent visual explanations, which has been ignored in the existing literature. In this paper, we propose Frequency-based Extremal Perturbation (F-EP) to explain a video understanding model's decisions. Because the explanations given by perturbation methods are noisy and non-smooth both spatially and temporally, we propose to modulate the frequencies of gradient maps from the neural network model with a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). We show in a range of experiments that F-EP provides more spatiotemporally consistent explanations that more faithfully represent the model's decisions compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

DRIVE: Deep Reinforced Accident Anticipation with Visual Explanation

Traffic accident anticipation aims to accurately and promptly predict the occurrence of a future accident from dashcam videos, which is vital for a safety-guaranteed self-driving system. To encourage an early and accurate decision, existing approaches typically focus on capturing the cues of spatial and temporal context before a future accident occurs. However, their decision-making lacks visual explanation and ignores the dynamic interaction with the environment. In this paper, we propose Deep ReInforced accident anticipation with Visual Explanation, named DRIVE. The method simulates both the bottom-up and top-down visual attention mechanism in a dashcam observation environment so that the decision from the proposed stochastic multi-task agent can be visually explained by attentive regions. Moreover, the proposed dense anticipation reward and sparse fixation reward are effective in training the DRIVE model with our improved reinforcement learning algorithm. Experimental results show that the DRIVE model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple real-world traffic accident datasets. Code and pre-trained model are available at \url{https://www.rit.edu/actionlab/drive}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Evidential Deep Learning for Open Set Action Recognition

In a real-world scenario, human actions are typically out of the distribution from training data, which requires a model to both recognize the known actions and reject the unknown. Different from image data, video actions are more challenging to be recognized in an open-set setting due to the uncertain temporal dynamics and static bias of human actions. In this paper, we propose a Deep Evidential Action Recognition (DEAR) method to recognize actions in an open testing set. Specifically, we formulate the action recognition problem from the evidential deep learning (EDL) perspective and propose a novel model calibration method to regularize the EDL training. Besides, to mitigate the static bias of video representation, we propose a plug-and-play module to debias the learned representation through contrastive learning. Experimental results show that our DEAR method achieves consistent performance gain on multiple mainstream action recognition models and benchmarks. Code and pre-trained models are available at {\small{\url{https://www.rit.edu/actionlab/dear}}}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Universal 3-Dimensional Perturbations for Black-Box Attacks on Video Recognition Systems

Widely deployed deep neural network (DNN) models have been proven to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations in many applications (e.g., image, audio and text classifications). To date, there are only a few adversarial perturbations proposed to deviate the DNN models in video recognition systems by simply injecting 2D perturbations into video frames. However, such attacks may overly perturb the videos without learning the spatio-temporal features (across temporal frames), which are commonly extracted by DNN models for video recognition. To our best knowledge, we propose the first black-box attack framework that generates universal 3-dimensional (U3D) perturbations to subvert a variety of video recognition systems. U3D has many advantages, such as (1) as the transfer-based attack, U3D can universally attack multiple DNN models for video recognition without accessing to the target DNN model; (2) the high transferability of U3D makes such universal black-box attack easy-to-launch, which can be further enhanced by integrating queries over the target model when necessary; (3) U3D ensures human-imperceptibility; (4) U3D can bypass the existing state-of-the-art defense schemes; (5) U3D can be efficiently generated with a few pre-learned parameters, and then immediately injected to attack real-time DNN-based video recognition systems. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate U3D on multiple DNN models and three large-scale video datasets. The experimental results demonstrate its superiority and practicality.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Group Activity Prediction with Sequential Relational Anticipation Model

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predict group activities given the beginning frames with incomplete activity executions. Existing action prediction approaches learn to enhance the representation power of the partial observation. However, for group activity prediction, the relation evolution of people's activity and their positions over time is an important cue for predicting group activity. To this end, we propose a sequential relational anticipation model (SRAM) that summarizes the relational dynamics in the partial observation and progressively anticipates the group representations with rich discriminative information. Our model explicitly anticipates both activity features and positions by two graph auto-encoders, aiming to learn a discriminative group representation for group activity prediction. Experimental results on two popularly used datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art activity prediction methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Uncertainty-based Traffic Accident Anticipation with Spatio-Temporal Relational Learning

Traffic accident anticipation aims to predict accidents from dashcam videos as early as possible, which is critical to safety-guaranteed self-driving systems. With cluttered traffic scenes and limited visual cues, it is of great challenge to predict how long there will be an accident from early observed frames. Most existing approaches are developed to learn features of accident-relevant agents for accident anticipation, while ignoring the features of their spatial and temporal relations. Besides, current deterministic deep neural networks could be overconfident in false predictions, leading to high risk of traffic accidents caused by self-driving systems. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-based accident anticipation model with spatio-temporal relational learning. It sequentially predicts the probability of traffic accident occurrence with dashcam videos. Specifically, we propose to take advantage of graph convolution and recurrent networks for relational feature learning, and leverage Bayesian neural networks to address the intrinsic variability of latent relational representations. The derived uncertainty-based ranking loss is found to significantly boost model performance by improving the quality of relational features. In addition, we collect a new Car Crash Dataset (CCD) for traffic accident anticipation which contains environmental attributes and accident reasons annotations. Experimental results on both public and the newly-compiled datasets show state-of-the-art performance of our model. Our code and CCD dataset are available at https://github.com/Cogito2012/UString.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Object-Aware Centroid Voting for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection aims to detect objects in a 3D physical world from a single camera. However, recent approaches either rely on expensive LiDAR devices, or resort to dense pixel-wise depth estimation that causes prohibitive computational cost. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable monocular 3D object detector without learning the dense depth. Specifically, the grid coordinates of a 2D box are first projected back to 3D space with the pinhole model as 3D centroids proposals. Then, a novel object-aware voting approach is introduced, which considers both the region-wise appearance attention and the geometric projection distribution, to vote the 3D centroid proposals for 3D object localization. With the late fusion and the predicted 3D orientation and dimension, the 3D bounding boxes of objects can be detected from a single RGB image. The method is straightforward yet significantly superior to other monocular-based methods. Extensive experimental results on the challenging KITTI benchmark validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Residual Dense Network for Image Restoration

Convolutional neural network has recently achieved great success for image restoration (IR) and also offered hierarchical features. However, most deep CNN based IR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-quality images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in IR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via densely connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory mechanism. To adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilize the training of wider network, we proposed local feature fusion in RDB. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RDN with several representative IR applications, single image super-resolution, Gaussian image denoising, image compression artifact reduction, and image deblurring. Experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods for each IR task quantitatively and visually.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Cascaded Detail-Preserving Networks for Super-Resolution of Document Images

The accuracy of OCR is usually affected by the quality of the input document image and different kinds of marred document images hamper the OCR results. Among these scenarios, the low-resolution image is a common and challenging case. In this paper, we propose the cascaded networks for document image super-resolution. Our model is composed by the Detail-Preserving Networks with small magnification. The loss function with perceptual terms is designed to simultaneously preserve the original patterns and enhance the edge of the characters. These networks are trained with the same architecture and different parameters and then assembled into a pipeline model with a larger magnification. The low-resolution images can upscale gradually by passing through each Detail-Preserving Network until the final high-resolution images. Through extensive experiments on two scanning document image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art image super-resolution methods, and combining it with standard OCR system lead to signification improvements on the recognition results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution

A very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR) and offered hierarchical features as well. However, most deep CNN based SR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-resolution (LR) images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in image SR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via dense connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory (CM) mechanism. Local feature fusion in RDB is then used to adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilizes the training of wider network. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with different degradation models show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗