Linearizing Visual Processes with Convolutional Variational Autoencoders

This work studies the problem of modeling non-linear visual processes by learning linear generative models from observed sequences. We propose a joint learning framework, combining a Linear Dynamic System and a Variational Autoencoder with convolutional layers. After discussing several conditions for linearizing neural networks, we propose an architecture that allows Variational Autoencoders to simultaneously learn the non-linear observation as well as the linear state-transition from a sequence of observed frames. The proposed framework is demonstrated experimentally in three series of synthesis experiments.