How Unique Is a Face: An Investigative Study

Face recognition has been widely accepted as a means of identification in applications ranging from border control to security in the banking sector. Surprisingly, while widely accepted, we still lack the understanding of uniqueness or distinctiveness of faces as biometric modality. In this work, we study the impact of factors such as image resolution, feature representation, database size, age and gender on uniqueness denoted by the Kullback-Leibler divergence between genuine and impostor distributions. Towards understanding the impact, we present experimental results on the datasets AT&T, LFW, IMDb-Face, as well as ND-TWINS, with the feature extraction algorithms VGGFace, VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNet and DenseNet121, that reveal the quantitative impact of the named factors. While these are early results, our findings indicate the need for a better understanding of the concept of biometric uniqueness and its implication on face recognition.

InMoDeGAN: Interpretable Motion Decomposition Generative Adversarial Network for Video Generation

In this work, we introduce an unconditional video generative model, InMoDeGAN, targeted to (a) generate high quality videos, as well as to (b) allow for interpretation of the latent space. For the latter, we place emphasis on interpreting and manipulating motion. Towards this, we decompose motion into semantic sub-spaces, which allow for control of generated samples. We design the architecture of InMoDeGAN-generator in accordance to proposed Linear Motion Decomposition, which carries the assumption that motion can be represented by a dictionary, with related vectors forming an orthogonal basis in the latent space. Each vector in the basis represents a semantic sub-space. In addition, a Temporal Pyramid Discriminator analyzes videos at different temporal resolutions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that our model systematically and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the VoxCeleb2-mini and BAIR-robot datasets w.r.t. video quality related to (a). Towards (b) we present experimental results, confirming that decomposed sub-spaces are interpretable and moreover, generated motion is controllable.

Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Annotating identity labels in large-scale datasets is a labour-intensive work, which strongly limits the scalability of person re-identification (ReID) in the real world. Unsupervised ReID addresses this issue by learning representations directly from unlabeled images. Recent self-supervised contrastive learning provides an effective approach for unsupervised representation learning. In this paper, we incorporate a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and contrastive learning into one joint training framework. While the GAN provides online data augmentation for contrastive learning, the contrastive module learns view-invariant features for generation. In this context, we propose a mesh-based novel view generator. Specifically, mesh projections serve as references towards generating novel views of a person. In addition, we propose a view-invariant loss to facilitate contrastive learning between original and generated views. Deviating from previous GAN-based unsupervised ReID methods involving domain adaptation, we do not rely on a labeled source dataset, which makes our method more flexible. Extensive experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods under both, fully unsupervised and unsupervised domain adaptive settings on several large scale ReID datsets.

Enhancing Diversity in Teacher-Student Networks via Asymmetric branches for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

The objective of unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is to learn discriminative features without labor-intensive identity annotations. State-of-the-art unsupervised Re-ID methods assign pseudo labels to unlabeled images in the target domain and learn from these noisy pseudo labels. Recently introduced Mean Teacher Model is a promising way to mitigate the label noise. However, during the training, self-ensembled teacher-student networks quickly converge to a consensus which leads to a local minimum. We explore the possibility of using an asymmetric structure inside neural network to address this problem. First, asymmetric branches are proposed to extract features in different manners, which enhances the feature diversity in appearance signatures. Then, our proposed cross-branch supervision allows one branch to get supervision from the other branch, which transfers distinct knowledge and enhances the weight diversity between teacher and student networks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method can significantly surpass the performance of previous work on both unsupervised domain adaptation and fully unsupervised Re-ID tasks.

Selective Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Based Pose Refinement System: Towards Understanding Human Activities in Real-World Videos

Taking advantage of human pose data for understanding human activities has attracted much attention these days. However, state-of-the-art pose estimators struggle in obtaining high-quality 2D or 3D pose data due to occlusion, truncation and low-resolution in real-world un-annotated videos. Hence, in this work, we propose 1) a Selective Spatio-Temporal Aggregation mechanism, named SST-A, that refines and smooths the keypoint locations extracted by multiple expert pose estimators, 2) an effective weakly-supervised self-training framework which leverages the aggregated poses as pseudo ground-truth instead of handcrafted annotations for real-world pose estimation. Extensive experiments are conducted for evaluating not only the upstream pose refinement but also the downstream action recognition performance on four datasets, Toyota Smarthome, NTU-RGB+D, Charades, and Kinetics-50. We demonstrate that the skeleton data refined by our Pose-Refinement system (SSTA-PRS) is effective at boosting various existing action recognition models, which achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance.

Toyota Smarthome Untrimmed: Real-World Untrimmed Videos for Activity Detection

This work aims at building a large scale dataset with daily-living activities performed in a natural manner. Activities performed in a spontaneous manner lead to many real-world challenges that are often ignored by the vision community. This includes low inter-class due to the presence of similar activities and high intra-class variance, low camera framing, low resolution, long-tail distribution of activities, and occlusions. To this end, we propose the Toyota Smarthome Untrimmed (TSU) dataset, which provides spontaneous activities with rich and dense annotations to address the detection of complex activities in real-world scenarios.

VPN: Learning Video-Pose Embedding for Activities of Daily Living

In this paper, we focus on the spatio-temporal aspect of recognizing Activities of Daily Living (ADL). ADL have two specific properties (i) subtle spatio-temporal patterns and (ii) similar visual patterns varying with time. Therefore, ADL may look very similar and often necessitate to look at their fine-grained details to distinguish them. Because the recent spatio-temporal 3D ConvNets are too rigid to capture the subtle visual patterns across an action, we propose a novel Video-Pose Network: VPN. The 2 key components of this VPN are a spatial embedding and an attention network. The spatial embedding projects the 3D poses and RGB cues in a common semantic space. This enables the action recognition framework to learn better spatio-temporal features exploiting both modalities. In order to discriminate similar actions, the attention network provides two functionalities - (i) an end-to-end learnable pose backbone exploiting the topology of human body, and (ii) a coupler to provide joint spatio-temporal attention weights across a video. Experiments show that VPN outperforms the state-of-the-art results for action classification on a large scale human activity dataset: NTU-RGB+D 120, its subset NTU-RGB+D 60, a real-world challenging human activity dataset: Toyota Smarthome and a small scale human-object interaction dataset Northwestern UCLA.

$\mathbf{G^{3}AN}$: This video does not exist. Disentangling motion and appearance for video generation

Creating realistic human videos introduces the challenge of being able to simultaneously generate both appearance, as well as motion. To tackle this challenge, we propose the novel spatio-temporal GAN-architecture $G^3AN$, which seeks to capture the distribution of high dimensional video data and to model appearance and motion in disentangled manner. The latter is achieved by decomposing appearance and motion in a three-stream Generator, where the main stream aims to model spatio-temporal consistency, whereas the two auxiliary streams augment the main stream with multi-scale appearance and motion features, respectively. An extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that our model systematically and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the facial expression datasets MUG and UvA-NEMO, as well as the Weizmann and UCF101 datasets on human action. Additional analysis on the learned latent representations confirms the successful decomposition of appearance and motion.

Deep-Temporal LSTM for Daily Living Action Recognition

In this paper, we propose to improve the traditional use of RNNs by employing a many to many model for video classification. We analyze the importance of modeling spatial layout and temporal encoding for daily living action recognition. Many RGB methods focus only on short term temporal information obtained from optical flow. Skeleton based methods on the other hand show that modeling long term skeleton evolution improves action recognition accuracy. In this work, we propose a deep-temporal LSTM architecture which extends standard LSTM and allows better encoding of temporal information. In addition, we propose to fuse 3D skeleton geometry with deep static appearance. We validate our approach on public available CAD60, MSRDailyActivity3D and NTU-RGB+D, achieving competitive performance as compared to the state-of-the art.

Person Re-identification for Real-world Surveillance Systems

Appearance based person re-identification in a real-world video surveillance system with non-overlapping camera views is a challenging problem for many reasons. Current state-of-the-art methods often address the problem by relying on supervised learning of similarity metrics or ranking functions to implicitly model appearance transformation between cameras for each camera pair, or group, in the system. This requires considerable human effort to annotate data. Furthermore, the learned models are camera specific and not transferable from one set of cameras to another. Therefore, the annotation process is required after every network expansion or camera replacement, which strongly limits their applicability. Alternatively, we propose a novel modeling approach to harness complementary appearance information without supervised learning that significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on multiple benchmark datasets.