Learning to represent and generate videos from unlabeled data is a very challenging problem. To generate realistic videos, it is important not only to ensure that the appearance of each frame is real, but also to ensure the plausibility of a video motion and consistency of a video appearance in the time direction. The process of video generation should be divided according to these intrinsic difficulties. In this study, we focus on the motion and appearance information as two important orthogonal components of a video, and propose Flow-and-Texture-Generative Adversarial Networks (FTGAN) consisting of FlowGAN and TextureGAN. In order to avoid a huge annotation cost, we have to explore a way to learn from unlabeled data. Thus, we employ optical flow as motion information to generate videos. FlowGAN generates optical flow, which contains only the edge and motion of the videos to be begerated. On the other hand, TextureGAN specializes in giving a texture to optical flow generated by FlowGAN. This hierarchical approach brings more realistic videos with plausible motion and appearance consistency. Our experiments show that our model generates more plausible motion videos and also achieves significantly improved performance for unsupervised action classification in comparison to previous GAN works. In addition, because our model generates videos from two independent information, our model can generate new combinations of motion and attribute that are not seen in training data, such as a video in which a person is doing sit-up in a baseball ground.

We present a novel dataset and a novel algorithm for recognizing activities of daily living (ADL) from a first-person wearable camera. Handled objects are crucially important for egocentric ADL recognition. For specific examination of objects related to users' actions separately from other objects in an environment, many previous works have addressed the detection of handled objects in images captured from head-mounted and chest-mounted cameras. Nevertheless, detecting handled objects is not always easy because they tend to appear small in images. They can be occluded by a user's body. As described herein, we mount a camera on a user's wrist. A wrist-mounted camera can capture handled objects at a large scale, and thus it enables us to skip the object detection process. To compare a wrist-mounted camera and a head-mounted camera, we also developed a novel and publicly available dataset1that includes videos and annotations of daily activities captured simultaneously by both cameras. Additionally, we propose a discriminative video representation that retains spatial and temporal information after encoding the frame descriptors extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNN).

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are superior to fully connected neural networks in various speech recognition tasks and the advantage is pronounced in noisy environments. In recent years, many techniques have been proposed in the computer vision community to improve CNN's classification performance. This paper considers two approaches recently developed for image classification and examines their impacts on noisy speech recognition performance. The first approach is to increase the depth of convolution layers. Different approaches to deepening the CNNs are compared. In particular, the usefulness of learning dynamic features with small convolution layers that perform convolution in time is shown along with a modulation frequency analysis of the learned convolution filters. The second approach is to use trainable activation functions. Specifically, the use of a Parametric Rectified Linear Unit (PReLU) is investigated. Experimental results show that both approaches yield significant improvements in performance. Combining the two approaches further reduces recognition errors, producing a word error rate of 11.1% in the Aurora4 task, the best published result for this corpus, with a standard one-pass bi-gram decoding set-up.

Recent advances in image captioning task have led to increasing interests in video captioning task. However, most works on video captioning are focused on generating single input of aggregated features, which hardly deviates from image captioning process and does not fully take advantage of dynamic contents present in videos. We attempt to generate video captions that convey richer contents by temporally segmenting the video with action localization, generating multiple captions from multiple frames, and connecting them with natural language processing techniques, in order to generate a story-like caption. We show that our proposed method can generate captions that are richer in contents and can compete with state-of-the-art method wRecent advances in image captioning task have led to increasing interests in video captioning task. However, most works on video captioning are focused on generating single input of aggregated features, which hardly deviates from image captioning process and does not fully take advantage of dynamic contents present in videos. We attempt to generate video captions that convey richer contents by temporally segmenting the video with action localization, generating multiple captions from multiple frames, and connecting them with natural language processing techniques, in order to generate a story-like caption. We show that our proposed method can generate captions that are richer in contents and can compete with state-of-the-art method without explicitly using video-level features as input.

Improved dense trajectories (iDT) have shown great performance in action recognition, and their combination with the two-stream approach has achieved state-of-the-art performance. It is, however, difficult for iDT to completely remove background trajectories from video with camera shaking. Trajectories in less discriminative regions should be given modest weights in order to create more discriminative local descriptors for action recognition. In addition, the two-stream approach, which learns appearance and motion information separately, cannot focus on motion in important regions when extracting features from spatial convolutional layers of the appearance network, and vice versa. In order to address the above mentioned problems, we propose a new local descriptor that pools a new convolutional layer obtained from crossing two networks along iDT. This new descriptor is calculated by applying discriminative weights learned from one network to a convolutional layer of the other network. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on ordinal action recognition datasets, 92.3% on UCF101, and 66.2% on HMDB51.