GeoDeformer: Geometric Deformable Transformer for Action Recognition

Abstract: Vision transformers have recently emerged as an effective alternative to convolutional networks for action recognition. However, vision transformers still struggle with geometric variations prevalent in video data. This paper proposes a novel approach, GeoDeformer, designed to capture the variations inherent in action video by integrating geometric comprehension directly into the ViT architecture. Specifically, at the core of GeoDeformer is the Geometric Deformation Predictor, a module designed to identify and quantify potential spatial and temporal geometric deformations within the given video. Spatial deformations adjust the geometry within individual frames, while temporal deformations capture the cross-frame geometric dynamics, reflecting motion and temporal progression. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we incorporate it into the established MViTv2 framework, replacing the standard self-attention blocks with GeoDeformer blocks. Our experiments at UCF101, HMDB51, and Mini-K200 achieve significant increases in both Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art results with only a marginal increase in computational cost. Additionally, visualizations affirm that GeoDeformer effectively manifests explicit geometric deformations and minimizes geometric variations. Codes and checkpoints will be released.