Temporal action detection (TAD) aims to detect all action boundaries and their corresponding categories in an untrimmed video. The unclear boundaries of actions in videos often result in imprecise predictions of action boundaries by existing methods. To resolve this issue, we propose a one-stage framework named TriDet. First, we propose a Trident-head to model the action boundary via an estimated relative probability distribution around the boundary. Then, we analyze the rank-loss problem (i.e. instant discriminability deterioration) in transformer-based methods and propose an efficient scalable-granularity perception (SGP) layer to mitigate this issue. To further push the limit of instant discriminability in the video backbone, we leverage the strong representation capability of pretrained large models and investigate their performance on TAD. Last, considering the adequate spatial-temporal context for classification, we design a decoupled feature pyramid network with separate feature pyramids to incorporate rich spatial context from the large model for localization. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of TriDet and its state-of-the-art performance on multiple TAD datasets, including hierarchical (multilabel) TAD datasets.
Video grounding aims to localize the target moment in an untrimmed video corresponding to a given sentence query. Existing methods typically select the best prediction from a set of predefined proposals or directly regress the target span in a single-shot manner, resulting in the absence of a systematical prediction refinement process. In this paper, we propose DiffusionVG, a novel framework with diffusion models that formulates video grounding as a conditional generation task, where the target span is generated from Gaussian noise inputs and interatively refined in the reverse diffusion process. During training, DiffusionVG progressively adds noise to the target span with a fixed forward diffusion process and learns to recover the target span in the reverse diffusion process. In inference, DiffusionVG can generate the target span from Gaussian noise inputs by the learned reverse diffusion process conditioned on the video-sentence representations. Our DiffusionVG follows the encoder-decoder architecture, which firstly encodes the video-sentence features and iteratively denoises the predicted spans in its specialized span refining decoder. Without bells and whistles, our DiffusionVG demonstrates competitive or even superior performance compared to existing well-crafted models on mainstream Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions benchmarks.
Previous approaches for automatic lay summarisation are exclusively reliant on the source article that, given it is written for a technical audience (e.g., researchers), is unlikely to explicitly define all technical concepts or state all of the background information that is relevant for a lay audience. We address this issue by augmenting eLife, an existing biomedical lay summarisation dataset, with article-specific knowledge graphs, each containing detailed information on relevant biomedical concepts. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we systematically investigate the effectiveness of three different approaches for incorporating knowledge graphs within lay summarisation models, with each method targeting a distinct area of the encoder-decoder model architecture. Our results confirm that integrating graph-based domain knowledge can significantly benefit lay summarisation by substantially increasing the readability of generated text and improving the explanation of technical concepts.
Surgical videos captured from microscopic or endoscopic imaging devices are rich but complex sources of information, depicting different tools and anatomical structures utilized during an extended amount of time. Despite containing crucial workflow information and being commonly recorded in many procedures, usage of surgical videos for automated surgical workflow understanding is still limited. In this work, we exploit scene graphs as a more holistic, semantically meaningful and human-readable way to represent surgical videos while encoding all anatomical structures, tools, and their interactions. To properly evaluate the impact of our solutions, we create a scene graph dataset from semantic segmentations from the CaDIS and CATARACTS datasets. We demonstrate that scene graphs can be leveraged through the use of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to tackle surgical downstream tasks such as surgical workflow recognition with competitive performance. Moreover, we demonstrate the benefits of surgical scene graphs regarding the explainability and robustness of model decisions, which are crucial in the clinical setting.
We propose a novel anomaly detection method for echocardiogram videos. The introduced method takes advantage of the periodic nature of the heart cycle to learn three variants of a variational latent trajectory model (TVAE). While the first two variants (TVAE-C and TVAE-R) model strict periodic movements of the heart, the third (TVAE-S) is more general and allows shifts in the spatial representation throughout the video. All models are trained on the healthy samples of a novel in-house dataset of infant echocardiogram videos consisting of multiple chamber views to learn a normative prior of the healthy population. During inference, maximum a posteriori (MAP) based anomaly detection is performed to detect out-of-distribution samples in our dataset. The proposed method reliably identifies severe congenital heart defects, such as Ebstein's Anomaly or Shone-complex. Moreover, it achieves superior performance over MAP-based anomaly detection with standard variational autoencoders when detecting pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular dilation. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed method enables interpretable explanations of its output through heatmaps highlighting the regions corresponding to anomalous heart structures.
Temporal relational modeling in video is essential for human action understanding, such as action recognition and action segmentation. Although Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have shown promising advantages in relation reasoning on many tasks, it is still a challenge to apply graph convolution networks on long video sequences effectively. The main reason is that large number of nodes (i.e., video frames) makes GCNs hard to capture and model temporal relations in videos. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we introduce an effective GCN module, Dilated Temporal Graph Reasoning Module (DTGRM), designed to model temporal relations and dependencies between video frames at various time spans. In particular, we capture and model temporal relations via constructing multi-level dilated temporal graphs where the nodes represent frames from different moments in video. Moreover, to enhance temporal reasoning ability of the proposed model, an auxiliary self-supervised task is proposed to encourage the dilated temporal graph reasoning module to find and correct wrong temporal relations in videos. Our DTGRM model outperforms state-of-the-art action segmentation models on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset. The code is available at //github.com/redwang/DTGRM.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources
We study how to generate captions that are not only accurate in describing an image but also discriminative across different images. The problem is both fundamental and interesting, as most machine-generated captions, despite phenomenal research progresses in the past several years, are expressed in a very monotonic and featureless format. While such captions are normally accurate, they often lack important characteristics in human languages - distinctiveness for each caption and diversity for different images. To address this problem, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network for generating diverse captions across images. Instead of estimating the quality of a caption solely on one image, the proposed comparative adversarial learning framework better assesses the quality of captions by comparing a set of captions within the image-caption joint space. By contrasting with human-written captions and image-mismatched captions, the caption generator effectively exploits the inherent characteristics of human languages, and generates more discriminative captions. We show that our proposed network is capable of producing accurate and diverse captions across images.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.
Dense video captioning aims to generate text descriptions for all events in an untrimmed video. This involves both detecting and describing events. Therefore, all previous methods on dense video captioning tackle this problem by building two models, i.e. an event proposal and a captioning model, for these two sub-problems. The models are either trained separately or in alternation. This prevents direct influence of the language description to the event proposal, which is important for generating accurate descriptions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end transformer model for dense video captioning. The encoder encodes the video into appropriate representations. The proposal decoder decodes from the encoding with different anchors to form video event proposals. The captioning decoder employs a masking network to restrict its attention to the proposal event over the encoding feature. This masking network converts the event proposal to a differentiable mask, which ensures the consistency between the proposal and captioning during training. In addition, our model employs a self-attention mechanism, which enables the use of efficient non-recurrent structure during encoding and leads to performance improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this end-to-end model on ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets, where we achieved 10.12 and 6.58 METEOR score, respectively.
Video captioning is the task of automatically generating a textual description of the actions in a video. Although previous work (e.g. sequence-to-sequence model) has shown promising results in abstracting a coarse description of a short video, it is still very challenging to caption a video containing multiple fine-grained actions with a detailed description. This paper aims to address the challenge by proposing a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for video captioning, where a high-level Manager module learns to design sub-goals and a low-level Worker module recognizes the primitive actions to fulfill the sub-goal. With this compositional framework to reinforce video captioning at different levels, our approach significantly outperforms all the baseline methods on a newly introduced large-scale dataset for fine-grained video captioning. Furthermore, our non-ensemble model has already achieved the state-of-the-art results on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.