Deep Learning for Detecting Multiple Space-Time Action Tubes in Videos

In this work, we propose an approach to the spatiotemporal localisation (detection) and classification of multiple concurrent actions within temporally untrimmed videos. Our framework is composed of three stages. In stage 1, appearance and motion detection networks are employed to localise and score actions from colour images and optical flow. In stage 2, the appearance network detections are boosted by combining them with the motion detection scores, in proportion to their respective spatial overlap. In stage 3, sequences of detection boxes most likely to be associated with a single action instance, called action tubes, are constructed by solving two energy maximisation problems via dynamic programming. While in the first pass, action paths spanning the whole video are built by linking detection boxes over time using their class-specific scores and their spatial overlap, in the second pass, temporal trimming is performed by ensuring label consistency for all constituting detection boxes. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on the challenging UCF101, J-HMDB-21 and LIRIS-HARL datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art results across the board and significantly increasing detection speed at test time. We achieve a huge leap forward in action detection performance and report a 20% and 11% gain in mAP (mean average precision) on UCF-101 and J-HMDB-21 datasets respectively when compared to the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted by British Machine Vision Conference 201

Compressed Video Action Recognition

Training robust deep video representations has proven to be much more challenging than learning deep image representations. This is in part due to the enormous size of raw video streams and the high temporal redundancy; the true and interesting signal is often drowned in too much irrelevant data. Motivated by that the superfluous information can be reduced by up to two orders of magnitude by video compression (using H.264, HEVC, etc.), we propose to train a deep network directly on the compressed video. This representation has a higher information density, and we found the training to be easier. In addition, the signals in a compressed video provide free, albeit noisy, motion information. We propose novel techniques to use them effectively. Our approach is about 4.6 times faster than Res3D and 2.7 times faster than ResNet-152. On the task of action recognition, our approach outperforms all the other methods on the UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Charades dataset.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Selected for spotlight presentation

Spatio-temporal human action detection and instance segmentation in videos

With an exponential growth in the number of video capturing devices and digital video content, automatic video understanding is now at the forefront of computer vision research. This thesis presents a series of models for automatic human action detection in videos and also addresses the space-time action instance segmentation problem. Both action detection and instance segmentation play vital roles in video understanding. Firstly, we propose a novel human action detection approach based on a frame-level deep feature representation combined with a two-pass dynamic programming approach. The method obtains a frame-level action representation by leveraging recent advances in deep learning based action recognition and object detection methods. To combine the the complementary appearance and motion cues, we introduce a new fusion technique which signicantly improves the detection performance. Further, we cast the temporal action detection as two energy optimisation problems which are solved using Viterbi algorithm. Exploiting a video-level representation further allows the network to learn the inter-frame temporal correspondence between action regions and it is bound to be a more optimal solution to the action detection problem than a frame-level representation. Secondly, we propose a novel deep network architecture which learns a video-level action representation by classifying and regressing 3D region proposals spanning two successive video frames. The proposed model is end-to-end trainable and can be jointly optimised for both proposal generation and action detection objectives in a single training step. We name our new network as \AMTnet" (Action Micro-Tube regression Network). We further extend the AMTnet model by incorporating optical ow features to encode motion patterns of actions. Finally, we address the problem of action instance segmentation in which multiple concurrent actions of the same class may be segmented out of an image sequence. By taking advantage of recent work on action foreground-background segmentation, we are able to associate each action tube with class-specic segmentations. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed models on challenging action detection benchmarks achieving new state-of-the-art results across the board and signicantly increasing detection speed at test time