Hierarchical Long-term Video Prediction without Supervision

Nevan Wichers, Ruben Villegas, Dumitru Erhan and Honglak Lee

ICML 2018

Paper, Code, Talk

Abstract

Much of recent research has been devoted to video prediction and generation, yet most of the previous work have demonstrated only limited success in generating videos on short-term horizons. The hierarchical video prediction method by Villegas et al. (2017b) is an example of a state-of-the-art method for long-term video prediction, but their method is limited because it requires ground truth annotation of high-level structures (e.g., human joint landmarks) at training time. Our network encodes the input frame, predicts a high-level en-coding into the future, and then a decoder with access to the first frame produces the predicted image from the predicted encoding. The decoder also produces a mask that outlines the predicted foreground object (e.g., person) as a by-product.Unlike Villegas et al. (2017b), we develop a novel training method that jointly trains the encoder, the predictor, and the decoder together without high-level supervision; we further improve upon this by using an adversarial loss in the feature space to train the predictor. Our method can predict about 20 seconds into the future and provides better results compared to Denton and Fergus (2018) andFinn et al. (2016) on the Human 3.6M dataset.

Human 3.6M dataset comparison videos (green: input / red: prediction)

NOTE: Static section of the mask finds the human pixels in the input frame to be moved into the future.


Human 3.6M dataset ablative study videos (green: input / red: prediction)

Shapes dataset comparison videos (green: input / red: prediction)