UntrimmedNets for Weakly Supervised Action Recognition and Detection

Current action recognition methods heavily rely on trimmed videos for model training. However, it is expensive and time-consuming to acquire a large-scale trimmed video dataset. This paper presents a new weakly supervised architecture, called UntrimmedNet, which is able to directly learn action recognition models from untrimmed videos without the requirement of temporal annotations of action instances. Our UntrimmedNet couples two important components, the classification module and the selection module, to learn the action models and reason about the temporal duration of action instances, respectively. These two components are implemented with feed-forward networks, and UntrimmedNet is therefore an end-to-end trainable architecture. We exploit the learned models for action recognition (WSR) and detection (WSD) on the untrimmed video datasets of THUMOS14 and ActivityNet. Although our UntrimmedNet only employs weak supervision, our method achieves performance superior or comparable to that of those strongly supervised approaches on these two datasets.Comment: camera-ready version to appear in CVPR201

Efficient Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos via Multi-Task Learning

This paper studies the joint learning of action recognition and temporal localization in long, untrimmed videos. We employ a multi-task learning framework that performs the three highly related steps of action proposal, action recognition, and action localization refinement in parallel instead of the standard sequential pipeline that performs the steps in order. We develop a novel temporal actionness regression module that estimates what proportion of a clip contains action. We use it for temporal localization but it could have other applications like video retrieval, surveillance, summarization, etc. We also introduce random shear augmentation during training to simulate viewpoint change. We evaluate our framework on three popular video benchmarks. Results demonstrate that our joint model is efficient in terms of storage and computation in that we do not need to compute and cache dense trajectory features, and that it is several times faster than its sequential ConvNets counterpart. Yet, despite being more efficient, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods with respect to accuracy.Comment: WACV 2017 camera ready, minor updates about test time efficienc

Every Moment Counts: Dense Detailed Labeling of Actions in Complex Videos

Every moment counts in action recognition. A comprehensive understanding of human activity in video requires labeling every frame according to the actions occurring, placing multiple labels densely over a video sequence. To study this problem we extend the existing THUMOS dataset and introduce MultiTHUMOS, a new dataset of dense labels over unconstrained internet videos. Modeling multiple, dense labels benefits from temporal relations within and across classes. We define a novel variant of long short-term memory (LSTM) deep networks for modeling these temporal relations via multiple input and output connections. We show that this model improves action labeling accuracy and further enables deeper understanding tasks ranging from structured retrieval to action prediction.Comment: To appear in IJC