Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Sparse Auto-Encoder for Sequence Classification

We present in this paper a novel learning-based approach for video sequence classification. Contrary to the dominant methodology, which relies on hand-crafted features that are manually engineered to be optimal for a specific task, our neural model automatically learns a sparse shift-invariant representation of the local 2D+t salient information, without any use of prior knowledge. To that aim, a spatio-temporal convolutional sparse autoencoder is trained to project a given input in a feature space, and to reconstruct it from its projection coordinates. Learning is performed in an unsupervised manner by minimizing a global parametrized objective function. The sparsity is ensured by adding a sparsifying logistic between the encoder and the decoder, while the shift-invariance is handled by including an additional hidden variable to the objective function. The temporal evolution of the obtained sparse features is learned by a long short-term memory recurrent neural network trained to classify each sequence. We show that, since the feature learning process is problem-independent, the model achieves outstanding performances when applied to two different problems, namely human action and facial expression recognition.