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

Temporal activity detection in untrimmed videos with recurrent neural networks

This work proposes a simple pipeline to classify and temporally localize activities in untrimmed videos. Our system uses features from a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (C3D) as input to train a a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns to classify video clips of 16 frames. After clip prediction, we post-process the output of the RNN to assign a single activity label to each video, and determine the temporal boundaries of the activity within the video. We show how our system can achieve competitive results in both tasks with a simple architecture. We evaluate our method in the ActivityNet Challenge 2016, achieving a 0.5874 mAP and a 0.2237 mAP in the classification and detection tasks, respectively. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://imatge-upc.github.io/activitynet-2016-cvprw/Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Weakly Supervised Action Localization by Sparse Temporal Pooling Network

We propose a weakly supervised temporal action localization algorithm on untrimmed videos using convolutional neural networks. Our algorithm learns from video-level class labels and predicts temporal intervals of human actions with no requirement of temporal localization annotations. We design our network to identify a sparse subset of key segments associated with target actions in a video using an attention module and fuse the key segments through adaptive temporal pooling. Our loss function is comprised of two terms that minimize the video-level action classification error and enforce the sparsity of the segment selection. At inference time, we extract and score temporal proposals using temporal class activations and class-agnostic attentions to estimate the time intervals that correspond to target actions. The proposed algorithm attains state-of-the-art results on the THUMOS14 dataset and outstanding performance on ActivityNet1.3 even with its weak supervision.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201