A Recurrent Transformer Network for Novel View Action Synthesis

Kara Marie Schatz, Erik Quintanilla, Shruti Vyas, Yogesh S Rawat ;

In this work, we address the problem of synthesizing human actions from novel views. Given an input video of an actor performing some action, we aim to synthesize a video with the same action performed from a novel view with the help of an appearance prior. We propose an end-to-end deep network to solve this problem. The proposed network utilizes the change in viewpoint to transform the action from the input view to the novel view in feature space. The transformed action is integrated with the target appearance using the proposed recurrent transformer network, which provides a transformed appearance for each time-step in the action sequence. The recurrent transformer network utilize action key-points which are determined in an unsupervised approach using the encoded action features. We also propose a hierarchical structure for the recurrent transformation which further improves the performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale multi-view action recognition NTU-RGB+D dataset. In addition, we show that the proposed method can transform the action to a novel viewpoint with an entirely different scene or actor. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/schatzkara/cross-view-video."