Learning Temporally Invariant and Localizable Features via Data Augmentation for Video Recognition

Deep-Learning-based video recognition has shown promising improvements along with the development of large-scale datasets and spatiotemporal network architectures. In image recognition, learning spatially invariant features is a key factor in improving recognition performance and robustness. Data augmentation based on visual inductive priors, such as cropping, flipping, rotating, or photometric jittering, is a representative approach to achieve these features. Recent state-of-the-art recognition solutions have relied on modern data augmentation strategies that exploit a mixture of augmentation operations. In this study, we extend these strategies to the temporal dimension for videos to learn temporally invariant or temporally localizable features to cover temporal perturbations or complex actions in videos. Based on our novel temporal data augmentation algorithms, video recognition performances are improved using only a limited amount of training data compared to the spatial-only data augmentation algorithms, including the 1st Visual Inductive Priors (VIPriors) for data-efficient action recognition challenge. Furthermore, learned features are temporally localizable that cannot be achieved using spatial augmentation algorithms. Our source code is available at https://github.com/taeoh-kim/temporal_data_augmentation.