Visual Dynamics: Probabilistic Future Frame Synthesis via Cross Convolutional Networks

Xue, Tianfan, Wu, Jiajun, Bouman, Katherine, Freeman, Bill

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We study the problem of synthesizing a number of likely future frames from a single input image. In contrast to traditional methods, which have tackled this problem in a deterministic or non-parametric way, we propose a novel approach which models future frames in a probabilistic manner. Our proposed method is therefore able to synthesize multiple possible next frames using the same model. Solving this challenging problem involves low- and high-level image and motion understanding for successful image synthesis. Here, we propose a novel network structure, namely a Cross Convolutional Network, that encodes images as feature maps and motion information as convolutional kernels to aid in synthesizing future frames.