We introduce multigrid Predictive Filter Flow (mgPFF), a framework for unsupervised learning on videos. The mgPFF takes as input a pair of frames and outputs per-pixel filters to warp one frame to the other. Compared to optical flow used for warping frames, mgPFF is more powerful in modeling sub-pixel movement and dealing with corruption (e.g., motion blur). We develop a multigrid coarse-to-fine modeling strategy that avoids the requirement of learning large filters to capture large displacement. This allows us to train an extremely compact model (4.6MB) which operates in a progressive way over multiple resolutions with shared weights. We train mgPFF on unsupervised, free-form videos and show that mgPFF is able to not only estimate long-range flow for frame reconstruction and detect video shot transitions, but also readily amendable for video object segmentation and pose tracking, where it substantially outperforms the published state-of-the-art without bells and whistles. Moreover, owing to mgPFF's nature of per-pixel filter prediction, we have the unique opportunity to visualize how each pixel is evolving during solving these tasks, thus gaining better interpretability.
@cite_64: We introduce a self-supervised method for learning visual correspondence from unlabeled video. The main idea is to use cycle-consistency in time as free supervisory signal for learning visual representations from scratch. At training time, our model learns a feature map representation to be useful for performing cycle-consistent tracking. At test time, we use the acquired representation to find nearest neighbors across space and time. We demonstrate the generalizability of the representation -- without finetuning -- across a range of visual correspondence tasks, including video object segmentation, keypoint tracking, and optical flow. Our approach outperforms previous self-supervised methods and performs competitively with strongly supervised methods.
@cite_90: This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation. Specifically, we use unsupervised motion-based segmentation on videos to obtain segments, which we use as pseudo ground truth to train a convolutional network to segment objects from a single frame. Given the extensive evidence that motion plays a key role in the development of the human visual system, we hope that this straightforward approach to unsupervised learning will be more effective than cleverly designed pretext tasks studied in the literature. Indeed, our extensive experiments show that this is the case. When used for transfer learning on object detection, our representation significantly outperforms previous unsupervised approaches across multiple settings, especially when training data for the target task is scarce.
@cite_53: 
@cite_34: 
@cite_24: We seek to understand the arrow of time in videos - what makes videos look like they are playing forwards or backwards? Can we visualize the cues? Can the arrow of time be a supervisory signal useful for activity analysis? To this end, we build three large-scale video datasets and apply a learning-based approach to these tasks. To learn the arrow of time efficiently and reliably, we design a ConvNet suitable for extended temporal footprints and for class activation visualization, and study the effect of artificial cues, such as cinematographic conventions, on learning. Our trained model achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale real-world video datasets. Through cluster analysis and localization of important regions for the prediction, we examine learned visual cues that are consistent among many samples and show when and where they occur. Lastly, we use the trained ConvNet for two applications: self-supervision for action recognition, and video forensics - determining whether Hollywood film clips have been deliberately reversed in time, often used as special effects.
@cite_43: 
@cite_72: Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the complexity of real-world urban scenes. To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these images have high quality pixel-level annotations, 20 000 additional images have coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark.
@cite_74: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been very successful in a variety of computer vision tasks, especially on those linked to recognition. Optical flow estimation has not been among the tasks CNNs succeeded at. In this paper we construct CNNs which are capable of solving the optical flow estimation problem as a supervised learning task. We propose and compare two architectures: a generic architecture and another one including a layer that correlates feature vectors at different image locations. Since existing ground truth data sets are not sufficiently large to train a CNN, we generate a large synthetic Flying Chairs dataset. We show that networks trained on this unrealistic data still generalize very well to existing datasets such as Sintel and KITTI, achieving competitive accuracy at frame rates of 5 to 10 fps.
@cite_23: We use large amounts of unlabeled video to learn models for visual tracking without manual human supervision. We leverage the natural temporal coherency of color to create a model that learns to colorize gray-scale videos by copying colors from a reference frame. Quantitative and qualitative experiments suggest that this task causes the model to automatically learn to track visual regions. Although the model is trained without any ground-truth labels, our method learns to track well enough to outperform the latest methods based on optical flow. Moreover, our results suggest that failures to track are correlated with failures to colorize, indicating that advancing video colorization may further improve self-supervised visual tracking.
@cite_16: Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual representations. Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision. That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to same object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52 mAP (no bounding box regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4 . We also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other tasks such as surface-normal estimation.
@cite_13: 
@cite_94: 
@cite_17: 
Unsupervised Learning on Free-Form Videos: Though there are a lot methods for unsupervised optical flow learning @cite_43 @cite_13 on videos (either synthetic @cite_74 @cite_53 or structured @cite_72 @cite_17 ), there is very few work about unsupervised learning on free-form videos: @cite_16 uses an offline tracker to provide signal to guide feature learning; @cite_24 @cite_94 @cite_34 learn to verify whether frames come with the correct order, and transfer the feature to action classification; @cite_90 learns for region segmentation on image by considering the moving pattern of rigid objects; @cite_23 learns for video colorization and shows that the learned features capture object or parts which are useful for object tracking; @cite_64 learns correspondence at patch level on videos with reconstruction between frames.