Seeing the Arrow of Time

Lyndsey C. Pickup, Zheng Pan, Donglai Wei, YiChang Shih, Changshui Zhang, Andrew Zisserman, Bernhard Scholkopf, William T. Freeman

CVPR 2014

doi:10.1109/CVPR.2014.262 /cvpr/2014/pickup2014cvpr-seeing/

Abstract

We explore whether we can observe Time's Arrow in a temporal sequence--is it possible to tell whether a video is running forwards or backwards? We investigate this somewhat philosophical question using computer vision and machine learning techniques. We explore three methods by which we might detect Time's Arrow in video sequences, based on distinct ways in which motion in video sequences might be asymmetric in time. We demonstrate good video forwards/backwards classification results on a selection of YouTube video clips, and on natively-captured sequences (with no temporally-dependent video compression), and examine what motions the models have learned that help discriminate forwards from backwards time.

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Cite

Text

Pickup et al. "Seeing the Arrow of Time." Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2014. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2014.262

Markdown

[Pickup et al. "Seeing the Arrow of Time." Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2014.](https://mlanthology.org/cvpr/2014/pickup2014cvpr-seeing/) doi:10.1109/CVPR.2014.262

BibTeX

@inproceedings{pickup2014cvpr-seeing,
  title     = {{Seeing the Arrow of Time}},
  author    = {Pickup, Lyndsey C. and Pan, Zheng and Wei, Donglai and Shih, YiChang and Zhang, Changshui and Zisserman, Andrew and Scholkopf, Bernhard and Freeman, William T.},
  booktitle = {Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  year      = {2014},
  doi       = {10.1109/CVPR.2014.262},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/cvpr/2014/pickup2014cvpr-seeing/}
}