  We present an efficient approach for leveraging the knowledge from multiple
modalities in training unimodal 3D convolutional neural networks (3D-CNNs) for
the task of dynamic hand gesture recognition. Instead of explicitly combining
multimodal information, which is commonplace in many state-of-the-art methods,
we propose a different framework in which we embed the knowledge of multiple
modalities in individual networks so that each unimodal network can achieve an
improved performance. In particular, we dedicate separate networks per
available modality and enforce them to collaborate and learn to develop
networks with common semantics and better representations. We introduce a
"spatiotemporal semantic alignment" loss (SSA) to align the content of the
features from different networks. In addition, we regularize this loss with our
proposed "focal regularization parameter" to avoid negative knowledge transfer.
Experimental results show that our framework improves the test time recognition
accuracy of unimodal networks, and provides the state-of-the-art performance on
various dynamic hand gesture recognition datasets.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Human-Computer Interaction;Machine Learning;Machine Learning