A variety of compression methods based on encoding images as weights of a neural network have been recently proposed. Yet, the potential of similar approaches for video compression remains unexplored. In this work, we suggest a set of experiments for testing the feasibility of compressing video using two architectural paradigms, coordinate-based MLP (CbMLP) and convolutional network. Furthermore, we propose a novel technique of neural weight stepping, where subsequent frames of a video are encoded as low-entropy parameter updates. To assess the feasibility of the considered approaches, we will test the video compression performance on several high-resolution video datasets and compare against existing conventional and neural compression techniques.
Partitioning CNN model computation between edge devices and servers has been proposed to alleviate edge devices' computing capability and network transmission limitations. However, due to the large data size of the intermediate output in CNN models, the transmission latency is still the bottleneck for such partition-offloading. Though compression methods on images like JPEG-based compression can be applied to the intermediate output data in CNN models, their compression rates are limited, and the compression leads to high accuracy loss. Other compression methods for partition-offloading adopt deep learning technology and require hours of additional training. In this paper, we propose a novel compression method DISC for intermediate output data in CNN models. DISC can be applied to partition-offloading systems in a plug-and-play way without any additional training. It shows higher performance on intermediate output data compression than the other compression methods designed for image compression. Further, AGLOP is developed to optimize the partition-offloading system by adjusting the partition point and the hyper-parameters of DISC. Based on our evaluation, DISC can achieve over 98% data size reduction with less than $1\%$ accuracy loss, and AGLOP can achieve over 91.2% end-to-end execution latency reduction compared with the original partition-offloading.
Everyone "knows" that compressing a video will degrade the accuracy of object tracking. Yet, a literature search on this topic reveals that there is very little documented evidence for this presumed fact. Part of the reason is that, until recently, there were no object tracking datasets for uncompressed video, which made studying the effects of compression on tracking accuracy difficult. In this paper, using a recently published dataset that contains tracking annotations for uncompressed videos, we examined the degradation of tracking accuracy due to video compression using rigorous statistical methods. Specifically, we examined the impact of quantization parameter (QP) and motion search range (MSR) on Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA). The results show that QP impacts MOTA at the 95% confidence level, while there is insufficient evidence to claim that MSR impacts MOTA. Moreover, regression analysis allows us to derive a quantitative relationship between MOTA and QP for the specific tracker used in the experiments.
Video captioning is one of the challenging problems at the intersection of vision and language, having many real-life applications in video retrieval, video surveillance, assisting visually challenged people, Human-machine interface, and many more. Recent deep learning based methods have shown promising results but are still on the lower side than other vision tasks (such as image classification, object detection). A significant drawback with existing video captioning methods is that they are optimized over cross-entropy loss function, which is uncorrelated to the de facto evaluation metrics (BLEU, METEOR, CIDER, ROUGE). In other words, cross-entropy is not a proper surrogate of the true loss function for video captioning. To mitigate this, methods like REINFORCE, Actor-Critic, and Minimum Risk Training (MRT) have been applied but have limitations and are not very effective. This paper proposes an alternate solution by introducing a dynamic loss network (DLN), providing an additional feedback signal that reflects the evaluation metrics directly. Our solution proves to be more efficient than other solutions and can be easily adapted to similar tasks. Our results on Microsoft Research Video Description Corpus (MSVD) and MSR-Video to Text (MSRVTT) datasets outperform previous methods.
We propose a novel neural representation for videos (NeRV) which encodes videos in neural networks. Unlike conventional representations that treat videos as frame sequences, we represent videos as neural networks taking frame index as input. Given a frame index, NeRV outputs the corresponding RGB image. Video encoding in NeRV is simply fitting a neural network to video frames and decoding process is a simple feedforward operation. As an image-wise implicit representation, NeRV output the whole image and shows great efficiency compared to pixel-wise implicit representation, improving the encoding speed by 25x to 70x, the decoding speed by 38x to 132x, while achieving better video quality. With such a representation, we can treat videos as neural networks, simplifying several video-related tasks. For example, conventional video compression methods are restricted by a long and complex pipeline, specifically designed for the task. In contrast, with NeRV, we can use any neural network compression method as a proxy for video compression, and achieve comparable performance to traditional frame-based video compression approaches (H.264, HEVC \etc). Besides compression, we demonstrate the generalization of NeRV for video denoising. The source code and pre-trained model can be found at //github.com/haochen-rye/NeRV.git.
Most of the existing neural video compression methods adopt the predictive coding framework, which first generates the predicted frame and then encodes its residue with the current frame. However, as for compression ratio, predictive coding is only a sub-optimal solution as it uses simple subtraction operation to remove the redundancy across frames. In this paper, we propose a deep contextual video compression framework to enable a paradigm shift from predictive coding to conditional coding. In particular, we try to answer the following questions: how to define, use, and learn condition under a deep video compression framework. To tap the potential of conditional coding, we propose using feature domain context as condition. This enables us to leverage the high dimension context to carry rich information to both the encoder and the decoder, which helps reconstruct the high-frequency contents for higher video quality. Our framework is also extensible, in which the condition can be flexibly designed. Experiments show that our method can significantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep video compression methods. When compared with x265 using veryslow preset, we can achieve 26.0% bitrate saving for 1080P standard test videos.
Due to the rapid emergence of short videos and the requirement for content understanding and creation, the video captioning task has received increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, we convert traditional video captioning task into a new paradigm, \ie, Open-book Video Captioning, which generates natural language under the prompts of video-content-relevant sentences, not limited to the video itself. To address the open-book video captioning problem, we propose a novel Retrieve-Copy-Generate network, where a pluggable video-to-text retriever is constructed to retrieve sentences as hints from the training corpus effectively, and a copy-mechanism generator is introduced to extract expressions from multi-retrieved sentences dynamically. The two modules can be trained end-to-end or separately, which is flexible and extensible. Our framework coordinates the conventional retrieval-based methods with orthodox encoder-decoder methods, which can not only draw on the diverse expressions in the retrieved sentences but also generate natural and accurate content of the video. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach surpasses the state-of-the-art performance, indicating the effectiveness and promising of the proposed paradigm in the task of video captioning.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Most of the existing work on automatic facial expression analysis focuses on discrete emotion recognition, or facial action unit detection. However, facial expressions do not always fall neatly into pre-defined semantic categories. Also, the similarity between expressions measured in the action unit space need not correspond to how humans perceive expression similarity. Different from previous work, our goal is to describe facial expressions in a continuous fashion using a compact embedding space that mimics human visual preferences. To achieve this goal, we collect a large-scale faces-in-the-wild dataset with human annotations in the form: Expressions A and B are visually more similar when compared to expression C, and use this dataset to train a neural network that produces a compact (16-dimensional) expression embedding. We experimentally demonstrate that the learned embedding can be successfully used for various applications such as expression retrieval, photo album summarization, and emotion recognition. We also show that the embedding learned using the proposed dataset performs better than several other embeddings learned using existing emotion or action unit datasets.
Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics system, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases require that a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures, like the dependency tree of sentences and the scene graph of images, is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. Unlike standard neural networks, graph neural networks retain a state that can represent information from its neighborhood with an arbitrary depth. Although the primitive graph neural networks have been found difficult to train for a fixed point, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful learning with them. In recent years, systems based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated graph neural network (GGNN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on many tasks mentioned above. In this survey, we provide a detailed review over existing graph neural network models, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.
Current methods for video analysis often extract frame-level features using pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Such features are then aggregated over time e.g., by simple temporal averaging or more sophisticated recurrent neural networks such as long short-term memory (LSTM) or gated recurrent units (GRU). In this work we revise existing video representations and study alternative methods for temporal aggregation. We first explore clustering-based aggregation layers and propose a two-stream architecture aggregating audio and visual features. We then introduce a learnable non-linear unit, named Context Gating, aiming to model interdependencies among network activations. Our experimental results show the advantage of both improvements for the task of video classification. In particular, we evaluate our method on the large-scale multi-modal Youtube-8M v2 dataset and outperform all other methods in the Youtube 8M Large-Scale Video Understanding challenge.