Skeleton-based human action recognition has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, most of the existing works focus on supervised learning which requiring a large number of annotated action sequences that are often expensive to collect. We investigate unsupervised representation learning for skeleton action recognition, and design a novel skeleton cloud colorization technique that is capable of learning skeleton representations from unlabeled skeleton sequence data. Specifically, we represent a skeleton action sequence as a 3D skeleton cloud and colorize each point in the cloud according to its temporal and spatial orders in the original (unannotated) skeleton sequence. Leveraging the colorized skeleton point cloud, we design an auto-encoder framework that can learn spatial-temporal features from the artificial color labels of skeleton joints effectively. We evaluate our skeleton cloud colorization approach with action classifiers trained under different configurations, including unsupervised, semi-supervised and fully-supervised settings. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D and NW-UCLA datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing unsupervised and semi-supervised 3D action recognition methods by large margins, and it achieves competitive performance in supervised 3D action recognition as well.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Qing Yuan Research Institute（清源研究院）
Detecting aligned 3D keypoints is essential under many scenarios such as object tracking, shape retrieval and robotics. However, it is generally hard to prepare a high-quality dataset for all types of objects due to the ambiguity of keypoint itself. Meanwhile, current unsupervised detectors are unable to generate aligned keypoints with good coverage. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised aligned keypoint detector, Skeleton Merger, which utilizes skeletons to reconstruct objects. It is based on an Autoencoder architecture. The encoder proposes keypoints and predicts activation strengths of …
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Key Lab of E-Commerce（浙江省电子商务重点实验室）
This paper targets unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning and proposes a new Hierarchical Contrast (HiCo) framework. Different from the existing contrastive-based solutions that typically represent an input skeleton sequence into instance-level features and perform contrast holistically, our proposed HiCo represents the input into multiple-level features and performs contrast in a hierarchical manner. Specifically, given a human skeleton sequence, we represent it into multiple feature vectors of different granularities from both temporal and spatial domains via sequence-to-…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）
The self-supervised pretraining paradigm has achieved great success in skeleton-based action recognition. However, these methods treat the motion and static parts equally, and lack an adaptive design for different parts, which has a negative impact on the accuracy of action recognition. To realize the adaptive action modeling of both parts, we propose an Actionlet-Dependent Contrastive Learning method (ActCLR). The actionlet, defined as the discriminative subset of the human skeleton, effectively decomposes motion regions for better action modeling. In detail, by contrasting with the static an…
Action recognition via 3D skeleton data is an emerging important topic in these years. Most existing methods either extract hand-crafted descriptors or learn action representations by supervised learning paradigms that require massive labeled data. In this paper, we for the first time propose a contrastive action learning paradigm named AS-CAL that can leverage different augmentations of unlabeled skeleton data to learn action representations in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, we first propose to contrast similarity between augmented instances (query and key) of the input skeleton sequen…
In this paper, we focus on unsupervised representation learning for skeleton-based action recognition. Existing approaches usually learn action representations by sequential prediction but they suffer from the inability to fully learn semantic information. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework named Prototypical Contrast and Reverse Prediction (PCRP), which not only creates reverse sequential prediction to learn low-level information (e.g., body posture at every frame) and high-level pattern (e.g., motion order), but also devises action prototypes to implicitly encode semant…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)（意大利技术研究院）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
This paper presents a novel end-to-end method for the problem of skeleton-based unsupervised human action recognition. We propose a new architecture with a convolutional autoencoder that uses graph Laplacian regularization to model the skeletal geometry across the temporal dynamics of actions. Our approach is robust towards viewpoint variations by including a self-supervised gradient reverse layer that ensures generalization across camera views. The proposed method is validated on NTU-60 and NTU-120 large-scale datasets in which it outperforms all prior unsupervised skeleton-based approaches o…
We propose a novel system for unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition. Given inputs of body keypoints sequences obtained during various movements, our system associates the sequences with actions. Our system is based on an encoder-decoder recurrent neural network, where the encoder learns a separable feature representation within its hidden states formed by training the model to perform prediction task. We show that according to such unsupervised training the decoder and the encoder self-organize their hidden states into a feature space which clusters similar movements into the same clu…
An unsupervised human action modeling framework can provide useful pose-sequence representation, which can be utilized in a variety of pose analysis applications. In this work we propose a novel temporal pose-sequence modeling framework, which can embed the dynamics of 3D human-skeleton joints to a continuous latent space in an efficient manner. In contrast to end-to-end framework explored by previous works, we disentangle the task of individual pose representation learning from the task of learning actions as a trajectory in pose embedding space. In order to realize a continuous pose embeddin…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；T Stone Robotics Institute of CUHK（香港中文大学汤申机器人研究所）
Learning a good 3D human pose representation is important for human pose related tasks, e.g. human 3D pose estimation and action recognition. Within all these problems, preserving the intrinsic pose information and adapting to view variations are two critical issues. In this work, we propose a novel Siamese denoising autoencoder to learn a 3D pose representation by disentangling the pose-dependent and view-dependent feature from the human skeleton data, in a fully unsupervised manner. These two disentangled features are utilized together as the representation of the 3D pose. To consider both t…
Existing deep interactive colorization models have focused on ways to utilize various types of interactions, such as point-wise color hints, scribbles, or natural-language texts, as methods to reflect a user's intent at runtime. However, another approach, which actively informs the user of the most effective regions to give hints for sketch image colorization, has been under-explored. This paper proposes a novel model-guided deep interactive colorization framework that reduces the required amount of user interactions, by prioritizing the regions in a colorization model. Our method, called Guid…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Key Research Center for Surface Monitoring and Analysis of Cultural Relics (SMARC), State Administration of Cultural Heritage, China（中国国家文物局文物表面监测与分析重点研究中心）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）
Skeleton-based human action recognition has been drawing more interest recently due to its low sensitivity to appearance changes and the accessibility of more skeleton data. However, even the 3D skeletons captured in practice are still sensitive to the viewpoint and direction gave the occlusion of different human-body joints and the errors in human joint localization. Such view variance of skeleton data may significantly affect the performance of action recognition. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new view-invariant representation learning approach, without any manual action …
In this work, we propose a Cross-view Contrastive Learning framework for unsupervised 3D skeleton-based action Representation (CrosSCLR), by leveraging multi-view complementary supervision signal. CrosSCLR consists of both single-view contrastive learning (SkeletonCLR) and cross-view consistent knowledge mining (CVC-KM) modules, integrated in a collaborative learning manner. It is noted that CVC-KM works in such a way that high-confidence positive/negative samples and their distributions are exchanged among views according to their embedding similarity, ensuring cross-view consistency in terms…
This study investigates unsupervised anomaly action recognition, which identifies video-level abnormal-human-behavior events in an unsupervised manner without abnormal samples, and simultaneously addresses three limitations in the conventional skeleton-based approaches: target domain-dependent DNN training, robustness against skeleton errors, and a lack of normal samples. We present a unified, user prompt-guided zero-shot learning framework using a target domain-independent skeleton feature extractor, which is pretrained on a large-scale action recognition dataset. Particularly, during the tra…
School of Computing（计算机学院）；NUS Graduate School（新加坡国立大学研究生院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
We propose the Motion Capsule Autoencoder (MCAE), which addresses a key challenge in the unsupervised learning of motion representations: transformation invariance. MCAE models motion in a two-level hierarchy. In the lower level, a spatio-temporal motion signal is divided into short, local, and semantic-agnostic snippets. In the higher level, the snippets are aggregated to form full-length semantic-aware segments. For both levels, we represent motion with a set of learned transformation invariant templates and the corresponding geometric transformations by using capsule autoencoders of a novel…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Skeleton-based action recognition is widely used in varied areas, e.g., surveillance and human-machine interaction. Existing models are mainly learned in a supervised manner, thus heavily depending on large-scale labeled data which could be infeasible when labels are prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrast-Reconstruction Representation Learning network (CRRL) that simultaneously captures postures and motion dynamics for unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition. It mainly consists of three parts: Sequence Reconstructor, Contrastive Motion Learner, and Informati…
Current state-of-the-art methods for skeleton-based action recognition are supervised and rely on labels. The reliance is limiting the performance due to the challenges involved in annotation and mislabeled data. Unsupervised methods have been introduced, however, they organize sequences into clusters and still require labels to associate clusters with actions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for skeleton-based action recognition, called SESAR, that connects these approaches. SESAR leverages the information from both unlabeled data and a handful of sequences actively selected for la…
Colorization of grayscale images has been a hot topic in computer vision. Previous research mainly focuses on producing a colored image to match the original one. However, since many colors share the same gray value, an input grayscale image could be diversely colored while maintaining its reality. In this paper, we design a novel solution for unsupervised diverse colorization. Specifically, we leverage conditional generative adversarial networks to model the distribution of real-world item colors, in which we develop a fully convolutional generator with multi-layer noise to enhance diversity,…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机技术研究所）
In this paper, we address self-supervised representation learning from human skeletons for action recognition. Previous methods, which usually learn feature presentations from a single reconstruction task, may come across the overfitting problem, and the features are not generalizable for action recognition. Instead, we propose to integrate multiple tasks to learn more general representations in a self-supervised manner. To realize this goal, we integrate motion prediction, jigsaw puzzle recognition, and contrastive learning to learn skeleton features from different aspects. Skeleton dynamics …
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Artificial Intelligence Industrial Technology Research Institute, Nanjing Institute of Technology（南京工程学院人工智能产业技术研究院）；School of Computer Science, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机科学学院）
针对无监督骨骼动作识别中随机增强难以产生直接语义扰动且会软化正负对的问题，提出 A²MC，利用攻击增强生成困难正样本并由 PNM 混合生成困难负样本，在三个公开数据集上达到与 SOTA 相当的性能。
Skeleton Motion Words for Unsupervised Skeleton-Based Temporal Action Segmentation
University of Bonn, Germany（波恩大学）；University College London, UK（伦敦大学学院）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Germany（拉马尔人工智能与机器学习研究所）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Labeled crowd scene images are expensive and scarce. To significantly reduce the requirement of the labeled images, we propose ColorCount, a novel CNN-based approach by combining self-supervised transfer colorization learning and global prior classification to leverage the abundantly available unlabeled data. The self-supervised colorization branch learns the semantics and surface texture of the image by using its color components as pseudo labels. The classification branch extracts global group priors by learning correlations among image clusters. Their fused resultant discriminative features…
University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；TTI Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
We investigate and improve self-supervision as a drop-in replacement for ImageNet pretraining, focusing on automatic colorization as the proxy task. Self-supervised training has been shown to be more promising for utilizing unlabeled data than other, traditional unsupervised learning methods. We build on this success and evaluate the ability of our self-supervised network in several contexts. On VOC segmentation and classification tasks, we present results that are state-of-the-art among methods not using ImageNet labels for pretraining representations. Moreover, we present the first in-depth …
Meet JEANIE: a Similarity Measure for 3D Skeleton Sequences via Temporal-Viewpoint Alignment
the Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）；Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学）
We propose a novel system for active semi-supervised feature-based action recognition. Given time sequences of features tracked during movements our system clusters the sequences into actions. Our system is based on encoder-decoder unsupervised methods shown to perform clustering by self-organization of their latent representation through the auto-regression task. These methods were tested on human action recognition benchmarks and outperformed non-feature based unsupervised methods and achieved comparable accuracy to skeleton-based supervised methods. However, such methods rely on K-Nearest N…
The success of deep learning in computer vision is rooted in the ability of deep networks to scale up model complexity as demanded by challenging visual tasks. As complexity is increased, so is the need for large amounts of labeled data to train the model. This is associated with a costly human annotation effort. To address this concern, with the long-term goal of leveraging the abundance of cheap unlabeled data, we explore methods of unsupervised "pre-training." In particular, we propose to use self-supervised automatic image colorization. We show that traditional methods for unsupervised lea…
Unified Multi-modal Unsupervised Representation Learning for Skeleton-based Action Understanding
Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Zhejiang Key Lab of E-Commerce（浙江省电子商务重点实验室）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Amazon Lab126（亚马逊Lab126）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
We present an unsupervised learning approach to recover 3D human pose from 2D skeletal joints extracted from a single image. Our method does not require any multi-view image data, 3D skeletons, correspondences between 2D-3D points, or use previously learned 3D priors during training. A lifting network accepts 2D landmarks as inputs and generates a corresponding 3D skeleton estimate. During training, the recovered 3D skeleton is reprojected on random camera viewpoints to generate new "synthetic" 2D poses. By lifting the synthetic 2D poses back to 3D and re-projecting them in the original camera…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY)（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学活跃老年生活卓越联合研究中心（LILY））
Recent advances in skeleton-based person re-identification (re-ID) obtain impressive performance via either hand-crafted skeleton descriptors or skeleton representation learning with deep learning paradigms. However, they typically require skeletal pre-modeling and label information for training, which leads to limited applicability of these methods. In this paper, we focus on unsupervised skeleton-based person re-ID, and present a generic Simple Masked Contrastive learning (SimMC) framework to learn effective representations from unlabeled 3D skeletons for person re-ID. Specifically, to fully…
Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学活跃老年生活卓越联合研究中心）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Person re-identification (re-ID) via 3D skeletons is an important emerging topic with many merits. Existing solutions rarely explore valuable body-component relations in skeletal structure or motion, and they typically lack the ability to learn general representations with unlabeled skeleton data for person re-ID. This paper proposes a generic unsupervised Skeleton Prototype Contrastive learning paradigm with Multi-level Graph Relation learning (SPC-MGR) to learn effective representations from unlabeled skeletons to perform person re-ID. Specifically, we first construct unified multi-level ske…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Korea Electronics Technology Institute（韩国电子技术研究院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
We propose a new transformer model for the task of unsupervised learning of skeleton motion sequences. The existing transformer model utilized for unsupervised skeleton-based action learning is learned the instantaneous velocity of each joint from adjacent frames without global motion information. Thus, the model has difficulties in learning the attention globally over whole-body motions and temporally distant joints. In addition, person-to-person interactions have not been considered in the model. To tackle the learning of whole-body motion, long-range temporal dynamics, and person-to-person …
We present Neural Marionette, an unsupervised approach that discovers the skeletal structure from a dynamic sequence and learns to generate diverse motions that are consistent with the observed motion dynamics. Given a video stream of point cloud observation of an articulated body under arbitrary motion, our approach discovers the unknown low-dimensional skeletal relationship that can effectively represent the movement. Then the discovered structure is utilized to encode the motion priors of dynamic sequences in a latent structure, which can be decoded to the relative joint rotations to repres…
This paper addresses the problem of 2D pose representation during unsupervised 2D to 3D pose lifting to improve the accuracy, stability and generalisability of 3D human pose estimation (HPE) models. All unsupervised 2D-3D HPE approaches provide the entire 2D kinematic skeleton to a model during training. We argue that this is sub-optimal and disruptive as long-range correlations are induced between independent 2D key points and predicted 3D ordinates during training. To this end, we conduct the following study. With a maximum architecture capacity of 6 residual blocks, we evaluate the performa…
Real-time body pose non-verbal communication with a consistency-based reliability measure
National University of Science and Technology "Politehnica" Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Simion Stoilow Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院西蒙·斯托伊洛数学研究所）；NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS（挪威研究中心）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
We describe an end-to-end method for recovering 3D human body mesh from single images and monocular videos. Different from the existing methods try to obtain all the complex 3D pose, shape, and camera parameters from one coupling feature, we propose a skeleton-disentangling based framework, which divides this task into multi-level spatial and temporal granularity in a decoupling manner. In spatial, we propose an effective and pluggable "disentangling the skeleton from the details" (DSD) module. It reduces the complexity and decouples the skeleton, which lays a good foundation for temporal mode…
Disentangled Human Body Representation Based on Unsupervised Semantic-Aware Learning
X-ray Product, Siemens Shanghai Medical Equipment Ltd.（西门子上海医疗设备有限公司X射线产品部）；University of Science and Technology of China, School of Biomedical Engineering & Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research（中国科学技术大学生物医学工程学院及苏州先进研究院）
TranSG: Transformer-Based Skeleton Graph Prototype Contrastive Learning with Structure-Trajectory Prompted Reconstruction for Person Re-Identification
LILY Research Center, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学LILY研究中心）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Rapid progress and superior performance have been achieved for skeleton-based action recognition recently. In this article, we investigate this problem under a cross-dataset setting, which is a new, pragmatic, and challenging task in real-world scenarios. Following the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) paradigm, the action labels are only available on a source dataset, but unavailable on a target dataset in the training stage. Different from the conventional adversarial learning-based approaches for UDA, we utilize a self-supervision scheme to reduce the domain shift between two skeleton-ba…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Point cloud completion aims at completing geometric and topological shapes from a partial observation. However, some topology of the original shape is missing, existing methods directly predict the location of complete points, without predicting structured and topological information of the complete shape, which leads to inferior performance. To better tackle the missing topology part, we propose LAKe-Net, a novel topology-aware point cloud completion model by localizing aligned keypoints, with a novel Keypoints-Skeleton-Shape prediction manner. Specifically, our method completes missing topol…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
We consider the problem of finding an accurate representation of neuron shapes, extracting sub-cellular features, and classifying neurons based on neuron shapes. In neuroscience research, the skeleton representation is often used as a compact and abstract representation of neuron shapes. However, existing methods are limited to getting and analyzing "curve" skeletons which can only be applied for tubular shapes. This paper presents a 3D neuron morphology analysis method for more general and complex neuron shapes. First, we introduce the concept of skeleton mesh to represent general neuron shap…
Motif Guided Graph Transformer with Combinatorial Skeleton Prototype Learning for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification
College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY)（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学老年活跃生活卓越联合研究中心）
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）
We introduce Point2Skeleton, an unsupervised method to learn skeletal representations from point clouds. Existing skeletonization methods are limited to tubular shapes and the stringent requirement of watertight input, while our method aims to produce more generalized skeletal representations for complex structures and handle point clouds. Our key idea is to use the insights of the medial axis transform (MAT) to capture the intrinsic geometric and topological natures of the original input points. We first predict a set of skeletal points by learning a geometric transformation, and then analyze…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；University of Wollongong（伍伦贡大学）
Recent contrastive based 3D action representation learning has made great progress. However, the strict positive/negative constraint is yet to be relaxed and the use of non-self positive is yet to be explored. In this paper, a Contrastive Positive Mining (CPM) framework is proposed for unsupervised skeleton 3D action representation learning. The CPM identifies non-self positives in a contextual queue to boost learning. Specifically, the siamese encoders are adopted and trained to match the similarity distributions of the augmented instances in reference to all instances in the contextual queue…
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Self-paced learning has been beneficial for tasks where some initial knowledge is available, such as weakly supervised learning and domain adaptation, to select and order the training sample sequence, from easy to complex. However its applicability remains unexplored in unsupervised learning, whereby the knowledge of the task matures during training. We propose a novel HYperbolic Self-Paced model (HYSP) for learning skeleton-based action representations. HYSP adopts self-supervision: it uses data augmentations to generate two views of the same sample, and it learns by matching one (named onlin…
