Posted by Debidatta Dwibedi, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google
Repeating processes ranging from natural cycles, such as phases of the moon or heartbeats and breathing, to artificial repetitive processes, like those found on manufacturing lines or in traffic patterns, are commonplace in our daily lives. Beyond just their prevalence, repeating processes are of interest to researchers for the variety of insights one can tease out of them. It may be that there is an underlying cause behind something that happens multiple times, or there may be gradual changes in a scene that may be useful for understanding. Sometimes, repeating processes provide us with unambiguous “action units”, semantically meaningful segments that make up an action. For example, if a person is chopping an onion, the action unit is the manipulation action that is repeated to produce additional slices. These units may be indicative of more complex activity and may allow us to analyze more such actions automatically at a finer time-scale without having a person annotate these units. For the above reasons, perceptual systems that aim to observe and understand our world for an extended period of time will benefit from a system that understands general repetitions.
In “Counting Out Time: Class Agnostic Video Repetition Counting in the Wild”, we present RepNet, a single model that can understand a broad range of repeating processes, ranging from people exercising or using tools, to animals running and birds flapping their wings, pendulums swinging, and a wide variety of others. In contrast to our previous work, which used cycle-consistency constraints across different videos of the same action to understand them at a fine-grained level, in this work we present a system that can recognize repetitions within a single video. Along with this model, we are releasing a dataset to benchmark class-agnostic counting in videos and a Colab notebook to run RepNet.
RepNet
RepNet is a model that takes as input a video that contains periodic action of a variety of classes (including those unseen during training) and returns the period of repetitions found therein. In the past the problem of repetition counting has been addressed by directly comparing pixel intensities in frames, but real world videos have camera motion, occlusion by objects in the field, drastic scale difference and changes in form, which necessitates learning of features invariant to such noise. To accomplish this we train a machine learning model in an end-to-end manner to directly estimate the period of the repetitions. The model consists of three parts: a frame encoder, an intermediate representation, called a temporal self-similarity matrix (which we will describe below), and a period predictor.
First, the frame encoder uses the ResNet architecture as a per-frame model to generate embeddings of each frame of the video The ResNet architecture was chosen since it has been successful for a number of image and video tasks. Passing each frame of a video through a ResNet-based encoder yields a sequence of embeddings.
At this point we calculate a temporal self-similarity matrix (TSM) by comparing each frame’s embedding with every other frame in the video, returning a matrix that is easy for subsequent modules to analyze for counting repetitions. This process surfaces self-similarities in the stream of video frames that enable period estimation, as demonstrated in the video below.
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| Demonstration of how the TSM processes images of the Earth’s day-night cycle. |
For each frame, we then use Transformers to predict the period of repetition and the periodicity (i.e., whether or not a frame is part of the periodic process) directly from the sequence of similarities in the TSM. Once we have the period, we obtain the per-frame count by dividing the number of frames captured in a periodic segment by the period length. We sum this up to predict the number of repetitions in the video.
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| Overview of the RepNet model. |
Temporal Self-Similarity Matrix
The example of the TSM from the day-night cycle, shown above, is derived from an idealized scenario with fixed period repetitions. TSMs from real videos often reveal fascinating structures in the world, as demonstrated in the three examples below. Jumping jacks are close to the ideal periodic action with a fixed period, while in contrast, the period of a bouncing ball declines as the ball loses energy through repeated bounces. The video of someone mixing concrete demonstrates repetitive action that is preceded and followed by a period without motion. These three behaviors are clearly distinguished in the learned TSM, which requires that the model pay attention to fine changes in the scene.
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| Jumping Jacks (constant period; video from Kinetics), Bouncing ball (decreasing period; Kinetics), Mixing concrete (aperiodic segments present in video; PERTUBE dataset). |
One advantage of using the TSM as an intermediate layer in RepNet is that the subsequent processing by the transformers is done in the self-similarity space and not in the feature space. This encourages generalization to unseen classes. For example, the TSMs produced by actions as different as jumping jacks or swimming are similar as long as the action was repeated at a similar pace. This allows us to train on some classes and yet expect generalization to unseen classes.
Data
One way to train the above model would be to collect a large dataset of videos that capture repetitive activities and label them with the repetition count. The challenge in this is two-fold. First, it requires one to examine a large number of videos to identify those with repeated actions. Following that, each video must be annotated with the number of times an action was repeated. While for certain tasks annotators can skip frames (for example, to classify a video as showing jumping jacks), they still need to see the entire video in order to count how many jumping jacks were performed.
We overcome this challenge by introducing a process for synthetic data generation that produces videos with repetitions using videos that may not contain repeating actions at all. This is accomplished by randomly selecting a segment of the video to repeat an arbitrary number of times, bookended by the original video context.
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| Our synthetic data generation pipeline that produces videos with repetitions from any video. |
While this process generates a video that resembles a natural-looking video with repeating processes, it is still too simple for deep learning methods, which can learn to cheat by looking for artifacts, instead of learning to recognize repetitions. To address this, we perform extreme data augmentation, which we call camera motion augmentation. In this method, we modify the video to simulate a camera that smoothly moves around using 2D affine motion as the video progresses.
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| Left: An example of a synthetic repeating video generated from a random video. Right: An example of a video with camera motion augmentation, which is tougher for the model, but results in better generalization to real repeating videos (both from Kinetics). |
Evaluation
Even though we can train a model on synthetic repeating videos, the resulting models must be able to generalize to real video of repeating processes. In order to evaluate the performance of the trained models on real videos, we collect a dataset of ~9000 videos from the Kinetics dataset. These videos span many action classes and capture diverse scenes, arising from the diversity of data seen on Youtube. We annotate these videos with the count of the action being repeated in the video. To encourage further research in this field, we are releasing the count annotations for this dataset, which we call Countix.
Applications
A class-agnostic counting model has many useful applications. RepNet serves as a single model that can count repetitions from many different domains:
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| RepNet can count repeated activities from a range of domains, such as slicing onions (left; video from Kinetics dataset), Earth’s diurnal cycle (middle; Himawari satellite data), or even a cheetah in motion (right; video from imgur.com). |
RepNet could be used to estimate heartbeat rates from echocardiogram videos even though it has not seen such videos in training:
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| Predicted heart rates: 45 bpm (left) and 75 bpm (right). True heart rates 46-50 bpm and 78-79 bpm, respectively. RepNet’s prediction of the heart rate across different devices is encouragingly close to the rate measured by the device. (Source for left and right) |
RepNet can also be used to monitor repeating activities for any changes in speed. Below we show how the Such changes in speed can also be used in other settings for quality or process control.
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| In this video, we see RepNet counting accelerating cellular oscillations observed under a laser microscope even though it has never seen such a video during training, (from Nature article). |
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| Left: Person performing a “mountain climber” exercise. Right: The 1D projection of the RepNet embeddings using principal component analysis, capturing the moment that the person changes their speed during the exercise. (Video from Kinetics) |
Release
We are releasing Countix annotations for the community to work on the problem of repetition counting. We are also releasing a Colab notebook for running RepNet. Using this you can run RepNet on your videos or even using your webcam to detect periodic activities in video and count repetitions automatically in videos.
Acknowledgements
This is joint work with Yusuf Aytar, Jonathan Tompson, Pierre Sermanet, and Andrew Zisserman. Special thanks to Tom Small for designing the visual explanation of TSM. The authors thank Anelia Angelova, Relja Arandjelović, Sourish Chaudhuri, Aishwarya Gomatam, Meghana Thotakuri, and Vincent Vanhoucke for their help with this project.
