Classification Matters: Improving Video Action Detection with Class-Specific Attention

Video action detection (VAD) aims to detect actors and classify their actions in a video. We figure that VAD suffers more from classification rather than localization of actors. Hence, we analyze how prevailing methods form features for classification and find that they prioritize actor regions, yet often overlooking the essential contextual information necessary for accurate classification. Accordingly, we propose to reduce the bias toward actor and encourage paying attention to the context that is relevant to each action class. By assigning a class-dedicated query to each action class, our model can dynamically determine where to focus for effective classification. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance on three challenging benchmarks with significantly fewer parameters and less computation.

Masked Autoencoder for Unsupervised Video Summarization

Summarizing a video requires a diverse understanding of the video, ranging from recognizing scenes to evaluating how much each frame is essential enough to be selected as a summary. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is acknowledged for its robustness and flexibility to multiple downstream tasks, but the video SSL has not shown its value for dense understanding tasks like video summarization. We claim an unsupervised autoencoder with sufficient self-supervised learning does not need any extra downstream architecture design or fine-tuning weights to be utilized as a video summarization model. The proposed method to evaluate the importance score of each frame takes advantage of the reconstruction score of the autoencoder's decoder. We evaluate the method in major unsupervised video summarization benchmarks to show its effectiveness under various experimental settings.

Decomposed Cross-modal Distillation for RGB-based Temporal Action Detection

Temporal action detection aims to predict the time intervals and the classes of action instances in the video. Despite the promising performance, existing two-stream models exhibit slow inference speed due to their reliance on computationally expensive optical flow. In this paper, we introduce a decomposed cross-modal distillation framework to build a strong RGB-based detector by transferring knowledge of the motion modality. Specifically, instead of direct distillation, we propose to separately learn RGB and motion representations, which are in turn combined to perform action localization. The dual-branch design and the asymmetric training objectives enable effective motion knowledge transfer while preserving RGB information intact. In addition, we introduce a local attentive fusion to better exploit the multimodal complementarity. It is designed to preserve the local discriminability of the features that is important for action localization. Extensive experiments on the benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing RGB-based action detectors. Notably, our framework is agnostic to backbones and detection heads, bringing consistent gains across different model combinations.

Exploring Temporally Dynamic Data Augmentation for Video Recognition

Data augmentation has recently emerged as an essential component of modern training recipes for visual recognition tasks. However, data augmentation for video recognition has been rarely explored despite its effectiveness. Few existing augmentation recipes for video recognition naively extend the image augmentation methods by applying the same operations to the whole video frames. Our main idea is that the magnitude of augmentation operations for each frame needs to be changed over time to capture the real-world video's temporal variations. These variations should be generated as diverse as possible using fewer additional hyper-parameters during training. Through this motivation, we propose a simple yet effective video data augmentation framework, DynaAugment. The magnitude of augmentation operations on each frame is changed by an effective mechanism, Fourier Sampling that parameterizes diverse, smooth, and realistic temporal variations. DynaAugment also includes an extended search space suitable for video for automatic data augmentation methods. DynaAugment experimentally demonstrates that there are additional performance rooms to be improved from static augmentations on diverse video models. Specifically, we show the effectiveness of DynaAugment on various video datasets and tasks: large-scale video recognition (Kinetics-400 and Something-Something-v2), small-scale video recognition (UCF- 101 and HMDB-51), fine-grained video recognition (Diving-48 and FineGym), video action segmentation on Breakfast, video action localization on THUMOS'14, and video object detection on MOT17Det. DynaAugment also enables video models to learn more generalized representation to improve the model robustness on the corrupted videos.

Spatiotemporal Augmentation on Selective Frequencies for Video Representation Learning

Recent self-supervised video representation learning methods focus on maximizing the similarity between multiple augmented views from the same video and largely rely on the quality of generated views. In this paper, we propose frequency augmentation (FreqAug), a spatio-temporal data augmentation method in the frequency domain for video representation learning. FreqAug stochastically removes undesirable information from the video by filtering out specific frequency components so that learned representation captures essential features of the video for various downstream tasks. Specifically, FreqAug pushes the model to focus more on dynamic features rather than static features in the video via dropping spatial or temporal low-frequency components. In other words, learning invariance between remaining frequency components results in high-frequency enhanced representation with less static bias. To verify the generality of the proposed method, we experiment with FreqAug on multiple self-supervised learning frameworks along with standard augmentations. Transferring the improved representation to five video action recognition and two temporal action localization downstream tasks shows consistent improvements over baselines.

Test-Time Adaptation for Out-of-distributed Image Inpainting

Deep learning-based image inpainting algorithms have shown great performance via powerful learned prior from the numerous external natural images. However, they show unpleasant results on the test image whose distribution is far from the that of training images because their models are biased toward the training images. In this paper, we propose a simple image inpainting algorithm with test-time adaptation named AdaFill. Given a single out-of-distributed test image, our goal is to complete hole region more naturally than the pre-trained inpainting models. To achieve this goal, we treat remained valid regions of the test image as another training cues because natural images have strong internal similarities. From this test-time adaptation, our network can exploit externally learned image priors from the pre-trained features as well as the internal prior of the test image explicitly. Experimental results show that AdaFill outperforms other models on the various out-of-distribution test images. Furthermore, the model named ZeroFill, that are not pre-trained also sometimes outperforms the pre-trained models.

Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection via Flow-based Generative Modeling on Appearance and Motion Latent Features

Surveillance video anomaly detection searches for anomalous events such as crimes or accidents among normal scenes. Since anomalous events occur rarely, there is a class imbalance problem between normal and abnormal data and it is impossible to collect all potential anomalous events, which makes the task challenging. Therefore, performing anomaly detection requires learning the patterns of normal scenes to detect unseen and undefined anomalies. Since abnormal scenes are distinguished from normal scenes by appearance or motion, lots of previous approaches have used an explicit pre-trained model such as optical flow for motion information, which makes the network complex and dependent on the pre-training. We propose an implicit two-path AutoEncoder (ITAE) that exploits the structure of a SlowFast network and focuses on spatial and temporal information through appearance (slow) and motion (fast) encoders, respectively. The two encoders and a single decoder learn normal appearance and behavior by reconstructing normal videos of the training set. Furthermore, with features from the two encoders, we suggest density estimation through flow-based generative models to learn the tractable likelihoods of appearance and motion features. Finally, we show the effectiveness of appearance and motion encoders and their distribution modeling through experiments in three benchmarks which result outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Smoother Network Tuning and Interpolation for Continuous-level Image Processing

In Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based image processing, most studies propose networks that are optimized to single-level (or single-objective); thus, they underperform on other levels and must be retrained for delivery of optimal performance. Using multiple models to cover multiple levels involves very high computational costs. To solve these problems, recent approaches train networks on two different levels and propose their own interpolation methods to enable arbitrary intermediate levels. However, many of them fail to generalize or have certain side effects in practical usage. In this paper, we define these frameworks as network tuning and interpolation and propose a novel module for continuous-level learning, called Filter Transition Network (FTN). This module is a structurally smoother module than existing ones. Therefore, the frameworks with FTN generalize well across various tasks and networks and cause fewer undesirable side effects. For stable learning of FTN, we additionally propose a method to initialize non-linear neural network layers with identity mappings. Extensive results for various image processing tasks indicate that the performance of FTN is comparable in multiple continuous levels, and is significantly smoother and lighter than that of other frameworks.

Enhanced Standard Compatible Image Compression Framework based on Auxiliary Codec Networks

To enhance image compression performance, recent deep neural network-based research can be divided into three categories: a learnable codec, a postprocessing network, and a compact representation network. The learnable codec has been designed for an end-to-end learning beyond the conventional compression modules. The postprocessing network increases the quality of decoded images using an example-based learning. The compact representation network is learned to reduce the capacity of an input image to reduce the bitrate while keeping the quality of the decoded image. However, these approaches are not compatible with the existing codecs or not optimal to increase the coding efficiency. Specifically, it is difficult to achieve optimal learning in the previous studies using the compact representation network, due to the inaccurate consideration of the codecs. In this paper, we propose a novel standard compatible image compression framework based on Auxiliary Codec Networks (ACNs). ACNs are designed to imitate image degradation operations of the existing codec, which delivers more accurate gradients to the compact representation network. Therefore, the compact representation and the postprocessing networks can be learned effectively and optimally. We demonstrate that our proposed framework based on JPEG and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard substantially outperforms existing image compression algorithms in a standard compatible manner.

Learning Temporally Invariant and Localizable Features via Data Augmentation for Video Recognition

Deep-Learning-based video recognition has shown promising improvements along with the development of large-scale datasets and spatiotemporal network architectures. In image recognition, learning spatially invariant features is a key factor in improving recognition performance and robustness. Data augmentation based on visual inductive priors, such as cropping, flipping, rotating, or photometric jittering, is a representative approach to achieve these features. Recent state-of-the-art recognition solutions have relied on modern data augmentation strategies that exploit a mixture of augmentation operations. In this study, we extend these strategies to the temporal dimension for videos to learn temporally invariant or temporally localizable features to cover temporal perturbations or complex actions in videos. Based on our novel temporal data augmentation algorithms, video recognition performances are improved using only a limited amount of training data compared to the spatial-only data augmentation algorithms, including the 1st Visual Inductive Priors (VIPriors) for data-efficient action recognition challenge. Furthermore, learned features are temporally localizable that cannot be achieved using spatial augmentation algorithms. Our source code is available at https://github.com/taeoh-kim/temporal_data_augmentation.