Temporal Relational Reasoning in Videos
This addresses the challenge of understanding temporal dependencies in videos for activity recognition, with incremental improvements in performance on specific benchmarks.
The paper tackles the problem of temporal relational reasoning in videos by introducing the Temporal Relation Network (TRN), which enables convolutional neural networks to accurately predict human-object interactions and gestures, outperforming two-stream and 3D convolution networks on activity recognition datasets.
Temporal relational reasoning, the ability to link meaningful transformations of objects or entities over time, is a fundamental property of intelligent species. In this paper, we introduce an effective and interpretable network module, the Temporal Relation Network (TRN), designed to learn and reason about temporal dependencies between video frames at multiple time scales. We evaluate TRN-equipped networks on activity recognition tasks using three recent video datasets - Something-Something, Jester, and Charades - which fundamentally depend on temporal relational reasoning. Our results demonstrate that the proposed TRN gives convolutional neural networks a remarkable capacity to discover temporal relations in videos. Through only sparsely sampled video frames, TRN-equipped networks can accurately predict human-object interactions in the Something-Something dataset and identify various human gestures on the Jester dataset with very competitive performance. TRN-equipped networks also outperform two-stream networks and 3D convolution networks in recognizing daily activities in the Charades dataset. Further analyses show that the models learn intuitive and interpretable visual common sense knowledge in videos.