347 research outputs found
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
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