State-of-the-art temporal action detectors inefficiently search the entire
video for specific actions. Despite the encouraging progress these methods
achieve, it is crucial to design automated approaches that only explore parts
of the video which are the most relevant to the actions being searched for. To
address this need, we propose the new problem of action spotting in video,
which we define as finding a specific action in a video while observing a small
portion of that video. Inspired by the observation that humans are extremely
efficient and accurate in spotting and finding action instances in video, we
propose Action Search, a novel Recurrent Neural Network approach that mimics
the way humans spot actions. Moreover, to address the absence of data recording
the behavior of human annotators, we put forward the Human Searches dataset,
which compiles the search sequences employed by human annotators spotting
actions in the AVA and THUMOS14 datasets. We consider temporal action
localization as an application of the action spotting problem. Experiments on
the THUMOS14 dataset reveal that our model is not only able to explore the
video efficiently (observing on average 17.3% of the video) but it also
accurately finds human activities with 30.8% mAP.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 201