Procedural Generation of Videos to Train Deep Action Recognition Networks

Cesar Roberto de Souza, Adrien Gaidon, Yohann Cabon, Antonio Manuel Lopez

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

94 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Deep learning for human action recognition in videos is making significant progress, but is slowed down by its dependency on expensive manual labeling of large video collections. In this work, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for "Procedural Human Action Videos". It contains a total of 39, 982 videos, with more than 1, 000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We introduce a deep multi-task representation learning architecture to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF101 and HMDB51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, significantly outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2594-2604
Number of pages11
JournalProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Procedural Generation of Videos to Train Deep Action Recognition Networks'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this