Enhancing temporal alignment with autoencoder regularization

Temporal alignment aligns two temporal sequences and is quite challenging due to drastic differences among temporal sequences and source data from different views. Canonical time warping (CTW) has shown great potential in temporal alignment tasks because it can reduce data redundancy by transforming high-dimensional data to a lower-dimensional subspace via canonical correlation analysis (CCA). However, CTW cannot uncover the underlying nonlinear structure embedded in the dataset. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder regularized canonical time warping method (AECTW) to overcome this drawback. Specifically, AECTW enhances lower-dimensional representation of each sequence by incorporating an autoencoder regularization, meanwhile reveals the nonlinear structure of features by explicit nonlinear transformation. By these strategies, AECTW significantly boosts CTW in temporal alignment tasks. Experiments on both synthetic data and two practical human action datasets demonstrate that AECTW outperforms the representative DTW-based methods.