Human pose analysis is presently dominated by deep convolutional networks trained with extensive manual annotations of joint locations and beyond. To avoid the need for expensive labeling, we exploit spatiotemporal relations in training videos for self-supervised learning of pose embeddings. The key idea is to combine temporal ordering and spatial placement estimation as auxiliary tasks for learning pose similarities in a Siamese convolutional network. Since the self-supervised sampling of both tasks from natural videos can result in ambiguous and incorrect training labels, our method employs a curriculum learning idea that starts training with the most reliable data samples and gradually increases the difficulty. To further refine the training process we mine repetitive poses in individual videos which provide reliable labels while removing inconsistencies. Our pose embeddings capture visual characteristics of human pose that can boost existing supervised representations in human pose estimation and retrieval. We report quantitative and qualitative results on these tasks in Olympic Sports, Leeds Pose Sports and MPII Human Pose datasets.
In order to learn a better representation, we argue that temporal cues which aim to learn whether given inputs are from temporally close windows or not will be a more effective approach. The use of temporal cues to learn whether given inputs are from temporally close windows or not is an effective approach for representation learning. Local proximity in data (slow feature analysis, SFA) has first been proposed by Becker and Hinton @cite_22 . The most recent spatial and temporal self-supervised learning methods are inspired from SFA. Goroshin @cite_17 created a connection between slowness and metric learning by temporal coherence. Motivated by temporal smoothness in feature space, Jayaraman and Grauman @cite_16 exploited higher order coherence, which they referred to as steadiness, in various tasks. Slowness or steadiness criterion can introduce significant drawbacks mostly because of limited motion and the repetitive nature of human actions. Thus, we learn auxiliary tasks in relatively small temporal windows which do not contain more than a single cycle of action. Moreover, the use of curriculum learning @cite_33 and repetition mining refine and guide our self-supervised tasks to learn stronger temporal features.
@cite_16 @cite_22 @cite_33 @cite_17
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Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) extracts slowly varying features from a quickly varying input signal [1]. It has been successfully applied to modeling the visual receptive fields of the cortical neurons. Sufficient experimental results in neuroscience suggest that the temporal slowness principle is a general learning principle in visual perception. In this paper, we introduce the SFA framework to the problem of human action recognition by incorporating the discriminative information with SFA learning and considering the spatial relationship of body parts. In particular, we consider four kinds of SFA learning strategies, including the original unsupervised SFA (U-SFA), the supervised SFA (S-SFA), the discriminative SFA (D-SFA), and the spatial discriminative SFA (SD--SFA), to extract slow feature functions from a large amount of training cuboids which are obtained by random sampling in motion boundaries. Afterward, to represent action sequences, the squared first order temporal derivatives are accumulated over all transformed cuboids into one feature vector, which is termed the Accumulated Squared Derivative (ASD) feature. The ASD feature encodes the statistical distribution of slow features in an action sequence. Finally, a linear support vector machine (SVM) is trained to classify actions represented by ASD features. We conduct extensive experiments, including two sets of control experiments, two sets of large scale experiments on the KTH and Weizmann databases, and two sets of experiments on the CASIA and UT-interaction databases, to demonstrate the effectiveness of SFA for human action recognition. Experimental results suggest that the SFA-based approach (1) is able to extract useful motion patterns and improves the recognition performance, (2) requires less intermediate processing steps but achieves comparable or even better performance, and (3) has good potential to recognize complex multiperson activities. Slow feature analysis (SFA) extracts slowly varying signals from input data and has been used to model complex cells in the primary visual cortex (V1). It transmits information to both ventral and dorsal pathways to process appearance and motion information, respectively. However, SFA only uses slowly varying features for local feature extraction, because they represent appearance information more effectively than motion information. To better utilize temporal information, we propose temporal variance analysis (TVA) as a generalization of SFA. TVA learns a linear transformation matrix that projects multidimensional temporal data to temporal components with temporal variance. Inspired by the function of V1, we learn receptive fields by TVA and apply convolution and pooling to extract local features. Embedded in the improved dense trajectory framework, TVA for action recognition is proposed to: 1) extract appearance and motion features from gray using slow and fast filters, respectively; 2) extract additional motion features using slow filters from horizontal and vertical optical flows; and 3) separately encode extracted local features with different temporal variances and concatenate all the encoded features as final features. We evaluate the proposed TVA features on several challenging data sets and show that both slow and fast features are useful in the low-level feature extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed TVA features outperform the conventional histogram-based features, and excellent results can be achieved by combining all TVA features. Machine learning research has, to a great extent, ignored an important aspect of many real world applications: time. Existing concept learners predominantly operate on a static set of attributes; for example, classifying flowers described by leaf size, pet al colour and pet al count. However, many real datasets are not static; they cannot sensibly be represented as a fixed set of attributes. Rather, the examples are expressed as features that vary temporally, and it is the temporal variation itself that is used for classification. Consider a simple gesture recognition domain, in which the temporal features are the position of the hands, finger bends, and so on. Looking at the position of the hand at one point in time is not likely to lead to a successful classification; it is only by analysing changes in position that recognition is possible. This thesis presents a new technique for temporal classification. By extracting sub-events from the training instances and parameterising them to allow feature construction for a subsequent learning process, it is able to employ background knowledge and express learnt concepts in terms of the background knowledge. The novel results of the thesis are: a temporal learner capable of producing comprehensible and accurate classifiers for multivariate time series that can learn from a small number of instances and can integrate non-temporal features; a feature construction technique that parameterises sub-events of the training set and clusters them to construct features for a propositional learner; and a technique for post-processing classification rules produced by the learner to give a comprehensible description expressed in the same form as the original background knowledge. The thesis discusses the implementation of TClass, a temporal learner. Results show rules that are comprehensible in many cases and accuracy results close to or better than existing technique—over 98 per cent for sign language and 72 per cent for ECGs (equivalent to the accuracy of a human cardiologist). One further surprising result is that a small set of very primitive sub-events proves to be functional, avoiding the need for labour-intensive background knowledge if it is not available. Learning rich visual representations often require training on datasets of millions of manually annotated examples. This substantially limits the scalability of learning effective representations as labeled data is expensive or scarce. In this paper, we address the problem of unsupervised visual representation learning from a large, unlabeled collection of images. By representing each image as a node and each nearest-neighbor matching pair as an edge, our key idea is to leverage graph-based analysis to discover positive and negative image pairs (i.e., pairs belonging to the same and different visual categories). Specifically, we propose to use a cycle consistency criterion for mining positive pairs and geodesic distance in the graph for hard negative mining. We show that the mined positive and negative image pairs can provide accurate supervisory signals for learning effective representations using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised constraint mining method in two settings: (1) unsupervised feature learning and (2) semi-supervised learning. For unsupervised feature learning, we obtain competitive performance with several state-of-the-art approaches on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. For semi-supervised learning, we show boosted performance by incorporating the mined constraints on three image classification datasets.