The THUMOS Challenge on Action Recognition for Videos "in the Wild"

Automatically recognizing and localizing wide ranges of human actions has crucial importance for video understanding. Towards this goal, the THUMOS challenge was introduced in 2013 to serve as a benchmark for action recognition. Until then, video action recognition, including THUMOS challenge, had focused primarily on the classification of pre-segmented (i.e., trimmed) videos, which is an artificial task. In THUMOS 2014, we elevated action recognition to a more practical level by introducing temporally untrimmed videos. These also include `background videos' which share similar scenes and backgrounds as action videos, but are devoid of the specific actions. The three editions of the challenge organized in 2013--2015 have made THUMOS a common benchmark for action classification and detection and the annual challenge is widely attended by teams from around the world. In this paper we describe the THUMOS benchmark in detail and give an overview of data collection and annotation procedures. We present the evaluation protocols used to quantify results in the two THUMOS tasks of action classification and temporal detection. We also present results of submissions to the THUMOS 2015 challenge and review the participating approaches. Additionally, we include a comprehensive empirical study evaluating the differences in action recognition between trimmed and untrimmed videos, and how well methods trained on trimmed videos generalize to untrimmed videos. We conclude by proposing several directions and improvements for future THUMOS challenges.Comment: Preprint submitted to Computer Vision and Image Understandin

Learning without Prejudice: Avoiding Bias in Webly-Supervised Action Recognition

Webly-supervised learning has recently emerged as an alternative paradigm to traditional supervised learning based on large-scale datasets with manual annotations. The key idea is that models such as CNNs can be learned from the noisy visual data available on the web. In this work we aim to exploit web data for video understanding tasks such as action recognition and detection. One of the main problems in webly-supervised learning is cleaning the noisy labeled data from the web. The state-of-the-art paradigm relies on training a first classifier on noisy data that is then used to clean the remaining dataset. Our key insight is that this procedure biases the second classifier towards samples that the first one understands. Here we train two independent CNNs, a RGB network on web images and video frames and a second network using temporal information from optical flow. We show that training the networks independently is vastly superior to selecting the frames for the flow classifier by using our RGB network. Moreover, we show benefits in enriching the training set with different data sources from heterogeneous public web databases. We demonstrate that our framework outperforms all other webly-supervised methods on two public benchmarks, UCF-101 and Thumos'14.Comment: Submitted to CVIU SI: Computer Vision and the We

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

Single Shot Temporal Action Detection

Temporal action detection is a very important yet challenging problem, since videos in real applications are usually long, untrimmed and contain multiple action instances. This problem requires not only recognizing action categories but also detecting start time and end time of each action instance. Many state-of-the-art methods adopt the "detection by classification" framework: first do proposal, and then classify proposals. The main drawback of this framework is that the boundaries of action instance proposals have been fixed during the classification step. To address this issue, we propose a novel Single Shot Action Detector (SSAD) network based on 1D temporal convolutional layers to skip the proposal generation step via directly detecting action instances in untrimmed video. On pursuit of designing a particular SSAD network that can work effectively for temporal action detection, we empirically search for the best network architecture of SSAD due to lacking existing models that can be directly adopted. Moreover, we investigate into input feature types and fusion strategies to further improve detection accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments on two challenging datasets: THUMOS 2014 and MEXaction2. When setting Intersection-over-Union threshold to 0.5 during evaluation, SSAD significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art systems by increasing mAP from 19.0% to 24.6% on THUMOS 2014 and from 7.4% to 11.0% on MEXaction2.Comment: ACM Multimedia 201

CDC: Convolutional-De-Convolutional Networks for Precise Temporal Action Localization in Untrimmed Videos

Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging problem. Given a long, untrimmed video consisting of multiple action instances and complex background contents, we need not only to recognize their action categories, but also to localize the start time and end time of each instance. Many state-of-the-art systems use segment-level classifiers to select and rank proposal segments of pre-determined boundaries. However, a desirable model should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. To this end, we design a novel Convolutional-De-Convolutional (CDC) network that places CDC filters on top of 3D ConvNets, which have been shown to be effective for abstracting action semantics but reduce the temporal length of the input data. The proposed CDC filter performs the required temporal upsampling and spatial downsampling operations simultaneously to predict actions at the frame-level granularity. It is unique in jointly modeling action semantics in space-time and fine-grained temporal dynamics. We train the CDC network in an end-to-end manner efficiently. Our model not only achieves superior performance in detecting actions in every frame, but also significantly boosts the precision of localizing temporal boundaries. Finally, the CDC network demonstrates a very high efficiency with the ability to process 500 frames per second on a single GPU server. We will update the camera-ready version and publish the source codes online soon.Comment: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201

Unsupervised Human Action Detection by Action Matching

We propose a new task of unsupervised action detection by action matching. Given two long videos, the objective is to temporally detect all pairs of matching video segments. A pair of video segments are matched if they share the same human action. The task is category independent---it does not matter what action is being performed---and no supervision is used to discover such video segments. Unsupervised action detection by action matching allows us to align videos in a meaningful manner. As such, it can be used to discover new action categories or as an action proposal technique within, say, an action detection pipeline. Moreover, it is a useful pre-processing step for generating video highlights, e.g., from sports videos. We present an effective and efficient method for unsupervised action detection. We use an unsupervised temporal encoding method and exploit the temporal consistency in human actions to obtain candidate action segments. We evaluate our method on this challenging task using three activity recognition benchmarks, namely, the MPII Cooking activities dataset, the THUMOS15 action detection benchmark and a new dataset called the IKEA dataset. On the MPII Cooking dataset we detect action segments with a precision of 21.6% and recall of 11.7% over 946 long video pairs and over 5000 ground truth action segments. Similarly, on THUMOS dataset we obtain 18.4% precision and 25.1% recall over 5094 ground truth action segment pairs.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR 2017 Workshop