Jia-Bin Huang works at Virginia Tech.

Posts

Learning Monocular Visual Odometry via Self-Supervised Long-Term Modeling

Monocular visual odometry (VO) suffers severely from error accumulation during frame-to-frame pose estimation. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning method for VO with special consideration for consistency over longer sequences. To this end, we model the long-term dependency in pose prediction using a pose network that features a two-layer convolutional LSTM module. We train the networks with purely self-supervised losses, including a cycle consistency loss that mimics the loop closure module in geometric VO. Inspired by prior geometric systems, we allow the networks to see beyond a small temporal window during training, through a novel a loss that incorporates temporally distant ( g $O(100)$) frames. Given GPU memory constraints, we propose a stage-wise training mechanism, where the first stage operates in a local time window and the second stage refines the poses with a “global” loss given the first stage features. We demonstrate competitive results on several standard VO datasets, including KITTI and TUM RGB-D.

Shuffle and Attend: Video Domain Adaptation

We address the problem of domain adaptation in videos for the task of human action recognition. Inspired by image-based domain adaptation, we can perform video adaptation by aligning the features of frames or clips of source and target videos. However, equally aligning all clips is sub-optimal as not all clips are informative for the task. As the first novelty, we propose an attention mechanism which focuses on more discriminative clips and directly optimizes for video-level (cf. clip-level) alignment. As the backgrounds are often very different between source and target, the source background-corrupted model adapts poorly to target domain videos. To alleviate this, as a second novelty, we propose to use the clip order prediction as an auxiliary task. The clip order prediction loss, when combined with domain adversarial loss, encourages learning of representations which focus on the humans and objects involved in the actions, rather than the uninformative and widely differing (between source and target) backgrounds. We empirically show that both components contribute positively towards adaptation performance. We report state-of-the-art performances on two out of three challenging public benchmarks, two based on the UCF and HMDB datasets, and one on Kinetics to NEC-Drone datasets. We also support the intuitions and the results with qualitative results.

Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition from Drones

We address the problem of human action classification in drone videos. Due to the high cost of capturing and labeling large-scale drone videos with diverse actions, we present unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation approaches that leverage both the existing fully annotated action recognition datasets and unannotated (or only a few annotated) videos from drones. To study the emerging problem of drone-based action recognition, we create a new dataset, NEC-DRONE, containing 5,250 videos to evaluate the task. We tackle both problem settings with 1) same and 2) different action label sets for the source (e.g., Kinectics dataset) and target domains (drone videos). We present a combination of video and instance-based adaptation methods, paired with either a classifier or an embedding-based framework to transfer the knowledge from source to target. Our results show that the proposed adaptation approach substantially improves the performance on these challenging and practical tasks. We further demonstrate the applicability of our method for learning cross-view action recognition on the Charades-Ego dataset. We provide qualitative analysis to understand the behaviors of our approaches.