Moments in Time Dataset: one million videos for event understanding

We present the Moments in Time Dataset, a large-scale human-annotated collection of one million short videos corresponding to dynamic events unfolding within three seconds. Modeling the spatial-audio-temporal dynamics even for actions occurring in 3 second videos poses many challenges: meaningful events do not include only people, but also objects, animals, and natural phenomena; visual and auditory events can be symmetrical or not in time ("opening" means "closing" in reverse order), and transient or sustained. We describe the annotation process of our dataset (each video is tagged with one action or activity label among 339 different classes), analyze its scale and diversity in comparison to other large-scale video datasets for action recognition, and report results of several baseline models addressing separately and jointly three modalities: spatial, temporal and auditory. The Moments in Time dataset designed to have a large coverage and diversity of events in both visual and auditory modalities, can serve as a new challenge to develop models that scale to the level of complexity and abstract reasoning that a human processes on a daily basis.

MIHash: Online Hashing with Mutual Information

Learning-based hashing methods are widely used for nearest neighbor retrieval, and recently, online hashing methods have demonstrated good performance-complexity trade-offs by learning hash functions from streaming data. In this paper, we first address a key challenge for online hashing: the binary codes for indexed data must be recomputed to keep pace with updates to the hash functions. We propose an efficient quality measure for hash functions, based on an information-theoretic quantity, mutual information, and use it successfully as a criterion to eliminate unnecessary hash table updates. Next, we also show how to optimize the mutual information objective using stochastic gradient descent. We thus develop a novel hashing method, MIHash, that can be used in both online and batch settings. Experiments on image retrieval benchmarks (including a 2.5M image dataset) confirm the effectiveness of our formulation, both in reducing hash table recomputations and in learning high-quality hash functions.

Do Less and Achieve More: Training CNNs for Action Recognition Utilizing Action Images from the Web

Recently, attempts have been made to collect millions of videos to train CNN models for action recognition in videos. However, curating such large-scale video datasets requires immense human labor, and training CNNs on millions of videos demands huge computational resources. In contrast, collecting action images from the Web is much easier and training on images requires much less computation. In addition, labeled web images tend to contain discriminative action poses, which highlight discriminative portions of a video's temporal progression. We explore the question of whether we can utilize web action images to train better CNN models for action recognition in videos. We collect 23.8K manually filtered images from the Web that depict the 101 actions in the UCF101 action video dataset. We show that by utilizing web action images along with videos in training, significant performance boosts of CNN models can be achieved. We then investigate the scalability of the process by leveraging crawled web images (unfiltered) for UCF101 and ActivityNet. We replace 16.2M video frames by 393K unfiltered images and get comparable performance.

Online Supervised Hashing for Ever-Growing Datasets

Supervised hashing methods are widely-used for nearest neighbor search in computer vision applications. Most state-of-the-art supervised hashing approaches employ batch-learners. Unfortunately, batch-learning strategies can be inefficient when confronted with large training datasets. Moreover, with batch-learners, it is unclear how to adapt the hash functions as a dataset continues to grow and diversify over time. Yet, in many practical scenarios the dataset grows and diversifies; thus, both the hash functions and the indexing must swiftly accommodate these changes. To address these issues, we propose an online hashing method that is amenable to changes and expansions of the datasets. Since it is an online algorithm, our approach offers linear complexity with the dataset size. Our solution is supervised, in that we incorporate available label information to preserve the semantic neighborhood. Such an adaptive hashing method is attractive; but it requires recomputing the hash table as the hash functions are updated. If the frequency of update is high, then recomputing the hash table entries may cause inefficiencies in the system, especially for large indexes. Thus, we also propose a framework to reduce hash table updates. We compare our method to state-of-the-art solutions on two benchmarks and demonstrate significant improvements over previous work.