Elahe Vahdani

Elahe Vahdani, Yingli Tian

This paper tackles the challenge of point-supervised temporal action detection, wherein only a single frame is annotated for each action instance in the training set. Most of the current methods, hindered by the sparse nature of annotated points, struggle to effectively represent the continuous structure of actions or the inherent temporal and semantic dependencies within action instances. Consequently, these methods frequently learn merely the most distinctive segments of actions, leading to the creation of incomplete action proposals. This paper proposes POTLoc, a Pseudo-label Oriented Transformer for weakly-supervised Action Localization utilizing only point-level annotation. POTLoc is designed to identify and track continuous action structures via a self-training strategy. The base model begins by generating action proposals solely with point-level supervision. These proposals undergo refinement and regression to enhance the precision of the estimated action boundaries, which subsequently results in the production of `pseudo-labels' to serve as supplementary supervisory signals. The architecture of the model integrates a transformer with a temporal feature pyramid to capture video snippet dependencies and model actions of varying duration. The pseudo-labels, providing information about the coarse locations and boundaries of actions, assist in guiding the transformer for enhanced learning of action dynamics. POTLoc outperforms the state-of-the-art point-supervised methods on THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet-v1.2 datasets.

Elahe Vahdani, Longlong Jing, Yingli Tian et al.

As part of the development of an educational tool that can help students achieve fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) through independent and interactive practice with immediate feedback, this paper introduces a near real-time system to recognize grammatical errors in continuous signing videos without necessarily identifying the entire sequence of signs. Our system automatically recognizes if performance of ASL sentences contains grammatical errors made by ASL students. We first recognize the ASL grammatical elements including both manual gestures and nonmanual signals independently from multiple modalities (i.e. hand gestures, facial expressions, and head movements) by 3D-ResNet networks. Then the temporal boundaries of grammatical elements from different modalities are examined to detect ASL grammatical mistakes by using a sliding window-based approach. We have collected a dataset of continuous sign language, ASL-HW-RGBD, covering different aspects of ASL grammars for training and testing. Our system is able to recognize grammatical elements on ASL-HW-RGBD from manual gestures, facial expressions, and head movements and successfully detect 8 ASL grammatical mistakes.

Longlong Jing, Elahe Vahdani, Matt Huenerfauth et al.

In this paper, we propose a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN) based multi-stream framework to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) manual signs (consisting of movements of the hands, as well as non-manual face movements in some cases) in real-time from RGB-D videos, by fusing multimodality features including hand gestures, facial expressions, and body poses from multi-channels (RGB, depth, motion, and skeleton joints). To learn the overall temporal dynamics in a video, a proxy video is generated by selecting a subset of frames for each video which are then used to train the proposed 3DCNN model. We collect a new ASL dataset, ASL-100-RGBD, which contains 42 RGB-D videos captured by a Microsoft Kinect V2 camera, each of 100 ASL manual signs, including RGB channel, depth maps, skeleton joints, face features, and HDface. The dataset is fully annotated for each semantic region (i.e. the time duration of each word that the human signer performs). Our proposed method achieves 92.88 accuracy for recognizing 100 ASL words in our newly collected ASL-100-RGBD dataset. The effectiveness of our framework for recognizing hand gestures from RGB-D videos is further demonstrated on the Chalearn IsoGD dataset and achieves 76 accuracy which is 5.51 higher than the state-of-the-art work in terms of average fusion by using only 5 channels instead of 12 channels in the previous work.