Attentional Pooling for Action Recognition

[project page] [paper]

If this code helps with your work/research, please consider citing

Rohit Girdhar and Deva Ramanan. Attentional Pooling for Action Recognition. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2017.

@inproceedings{Girdhar_17b_AttentionalPoolingAction,
    title = {Attentional Pooling for Action Recognition},
    author = {Girdhar, Rohit and Ramanan, Deva},
    booktitle = {NIPS},
    year = 2017
}

Pre-requisites

This code was trained and tested with

1. CentOS 6.5
2. Python 2.7
3. TensorFlow 1.1.0-rc2 (6a1825e2)

Getting started

Clone the code and create some directories for outputs

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/rohitgirdhar/AttentionalPoolingAction.git
$ export ROOT=`pwd`/AttentionalPoolingAction
$ cd $ROOT/src/
$ mkdir -p expt_outputs data
$ # compile some custom ops
$ cd custom_ops; make; cd ..

Data setup

You can download the tfrecord files for MPII I used from here and uncompress on to a fast local disk. If you want to create your own tfrecords, you can use the following steps, which is what I used to create the linked tfrecord files

Convert the MPII data into tfrecords. The system also can read from individual JPEG files, but that needs a slightly different intial setup.

First download the MPII images and annotations, and un-compress the files.

$ cd $ROOT/utils/dataset_utils
$ # Set the paths for MPII images and annotations file in gen_tfrecord_mpii.py
$ python gen_tfrecord_mpii.py  # Will generate the tfrecord files

Keypoint labels for other datasets

While MPII dataset comes with pose labels, I also experiment with HMDB-51 and HICO, pose for which was computed using an initial version of OpenPose. I provide the extracted keypoints here: HMDB51 and HICO.

Testing pre-trained models

First download and unzip the pretrained models to a $ROOT/src/pretrained_models/. The models can be run by

# Baseline model (no attention)
$ python eval.py --cfg ../experiments/001_MPII_ResNet_pretrained.yaml
# With attention
$ python eval.py --cfg ../experiments/002_MPII_ResNet_withAttention_pretrained.yaml
# With pose regularized attention
$ python eval.py --cfg ../experiments/003_MPII_ResNet_withPoseAttention_pretrained.yaml

Expected performance on MPII Validation set

Training

Train an attentional pooled model on MPII dataset, using python train.py --cfg <path to YAML file>.

$ cd $ROOT/src
$ python train.py --cfg ../experiments/002_MPII_ResNet_withAttention.yaml
# To train the model with pose regularized attention, use the following config
$ python train.py --cfg ../experiments/003_MPII_ResNet_withPoseAttention.yaml
# To train the baseline without attention, use the following config
$ python train.py --cfg ../experiments/001_MPII_ResNet.yaml

Testing and evaluation

Test the model trained above on the validation set, using python eval.py --cfg <path to YAML file>.

$ python eval.py --cfg ../experiments/002_MPII_ResNet_withAttention.yaml
# To evaluate the model with pose regularized attention
$ python eval.py --cfg ../experiments/003_MPII_ResNet_withPoseAttention.yaml
# To evaluate the model without attention
$ python train.py --cfg ../experiments/001_MPII_ResNet.yaml

The performance of these models should be similar to the above released pre-trained models.

Train + test on the final test set

This is for getting the final number on MPII test set.

# Train on the train + val set
$ python train.py --cfg ../experiments/004_MPII_ResNet_withAttention_train+val.yaml
# Test on the test set
$ python eval.py --cfg ../experiments/004_MPII_ResNet_withAttention_train+val.yaml --save
# Convert the output into the MAT files as expected by MPII authors (requires matlab/octave)
$ cd ../utils;
$ bash convert_mpii_result_for_eval.sh ../src/expt_outputs/004_MPII_ResNet_withAttention_train+val.yaml/<filename.h5>
# Now the generated mat file can be emailed to MPII authors for test evaluation