Local Frequency Domain Transformer Networks for Video Prediction

Video prediction is commonly referred to as forecasting future frames of a video sequence provided several past frames thereof. It remains a challenging domain as visual scenes evolve according to complex underlying dynamics, such as the camera's egocentric motion or the distinct motility per individual object viewed. These are mostly hidden from the observer and manifest as often highly non-linear transformations between consecutive video frames. Therefore, video prediction is of interest not only in anticipating visual changes in the real world but has, above all, emerged as an unsupervised learning rule targeting the formation and dynamics of the observed environment. Many of the deep learning-based state-of-the-art models for video prediction utilize some form of recurrent layers like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) or Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) at the core of their models. Although these models can predict the future frames, they rely entirely on these recurrent structures to simultaneously perform three distinct tasks: extracting transformations, projecting them into the future, and transforming the current frame. In order to completely interpret the formed internal representations, it is crucial to disentangle these tasks. This paper proposes a fully differentiable building block that can perform all of those tasks separately while maintaining interpretability. We derive the relevant theoretical foundations and showcase results on synthetic as well as real data. We demonstrate that our method is readily extended to perform motion segmentation and account for the scene's composition, and learns to produce reliable predictions in an entirely interpretable manner by only observing unlabeled video data.