The number of categories for action recognition is growing rapidly. It is
thus becoming increasingly hard to collect sufficient training data to learn
conventional models for each category. This issue may be ameliorated by the
increasingly popular 'zero-shot learning' (ZSL) paradigm. In this framework a
mapping is constructed between visual features and a human interpretable
semantic description of each category, allowing categories to be recognised in
the absence of any training data. Existing ZSL studies focus primarily on image
data, and attribute-based semantic representations. In this paper, we address
zero-shot recognition in contemporary video action recognition tasks, using
semantic word vector space as the common space to embed videos and category
labels. This is more challenging because the mapping between the semantic space
and space-time features of videos containing complex actions is more complex
and harder to learn. We demonstrate that a simple self-training and data
augmentation strategy can significantly improve the efficacy of this mapping.
Experiments on human action datasets including HMDB51 and UCF101 demonstrate
that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art zero-shot action recognition
performance.Comment: 5 page
