Video Prediction with Bidirectional Constraint Network

Future frame prediction in videos is promising avenue for unsupervised video representation learning. However video prediction has the huge solution space since the high-dimensionality and inherent uncertainty of the future video frames. Existing approaches impose weak constraints on the predictions, which results in motion confusion. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel model named Bidirectional Constraint Network (BCnet). BCnet consists of forward prediction module and backward prediction module. The forward prediction module learns to predict the future sequence from the present sequence, while the backward prediction module learns to invert the task. The closed loop of the two modules allows that the backward prediction module generates informative feedback signals. The feedback signals clamp down the solution space of forward prediction module. Therefore, our approach can effectively alleviate the motion confusion. We further evaluate BCnet by fine-tuning it for a supervised learning problem: human action recognition on the UCF-101 dataset. We show that the representation help improve classification accuracy. Extensive experiments on several challenging public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization ability of our approach.