Temporal action proposal generation is an important yet challenging problem, since temporal proposals with rich action content are indispensable for analysing real-world videos with long duration and high proportion irrelevant content. This problem requires methods not only generating proposals with precise temporal boundaries, but also retrieving proposals to cover truth action instances with high recall and high overlap using relatively fewer proposals. To address these difficulties, we introduce an effective proposal generation method, named Boundary-Sensitive Network (BSN), which adopts "local to global" fashion. Locally, BSN first locates temporal boundaries with high probabilities, then directly combines these boundaries as proposals. Globally, with Boundary-Sensitive Proposal feature, BSN retrieves proposals by evaluating the confidence of whether a proposal contains an action within its region. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14, where BSN outperforms other state-of-the-art temporal action proposal generation methods with high recall and high temporal precision. Finally, further experiments demonstrate that by combining existing action classifiers, our method significantly improves the state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.
Action recognition. Action recognition is an important branch of video related research areas and has been extensively studied. Earlier methods such as improved Dense Trajectory (iDT) @cite_32 @cite_43 mainly adopt hand-crafted features such as HOF, HOG and MBH. In recent years, convolutional networks are widely adopted in many works @cite_29 @cite_50 @cite_18 @cite_34 and have achieved great performance. Typically, two-stream network @cite_29 @cite_50 @cite_34 learns appearance and motion features based on RGB frame and optical flow field separately. C3D network @cite_18 adopts 3D convolutional layers to directly capture both appearance and motion features from raw frames volume. Action recognition models can be used for extracting frame or snippet level visual features in long and untrimmed videos.
@cite_18 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_43 @cite_50 @cite_34
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Recognizing actions in videos is a challenging task as video is an information-intensive media with complex variations. Most existing methods have treated video as a flat data sequence while ignoring the intrinsic hierarchical structure of the video content. In particular, an action may span different granularities in this hierarchy including, from small to large, a single frame, consecutive frames (motion), a short clip, and the entire video. In this paper, we present a novel framework to boost action recognition by learning a deep spatio-temporal video representation at hierarchical multi-granularity. Specifically, we model each granularity as a single stream by 2D (for frame and motion streams) or 3D (for clip and video streams) convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The framework therefore consists of multi-stream 2D or 3D CNNs to learn both the spatial and temporal representations. Furthermore, we employ the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks on the frame, motion, and clip streams to exploit long-term temporal dynamics. With a softmax layer on the top of each stream, the classification scores can be predicted from all the streams, followed by a novel fusion scheme based on the multi-granular score distribution. Our networks are learned in an end-to-end fashion. On two video action benchmarks of UCF101 and HMDB51, our framework achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art. Deep convolutional networks have achieved great success for image recognition. However, for action recognition in videos, their advantage over traditional methods is not so evident. We present a general and flexible video-level framework for learning action models in videos. This method, called temporal segment network (TSN), aims to model long-range temporal structures with a new segment-based sampling and aggregation module. This unique design enables our TSN to efficiently learn action models by using the whole action videos. The learned models could be easily adapted for action recognition in both trimmed and untrimmed videos with simple average pooling and multi-scale temporal window integration, respectively. We also study a series of good practices for the instantiation of TSN framework given limited training samples. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on four challenging action recognition benchmarks: HMDB51 (71.0 ), UCF101 (94.9 ), THUMOS14 (80.1 ), and ActivityNet v1.2 (89.6 ). Using the proposed RGB difference for motion models, our method can still achieve competitive accuracy on UCF101 (91.0 ) while running at 340 FPS. Furthermore, based on the temporal segment networks, we won the video classification track at the ActivityNet challenge 2016 among 24 teams, which demonstrates the effectiveness of TSN and the proposed good practices. Deep convolutional networks have achieved great success for object recognition in still images. However, for action recognition in videos, the improvement of deep convolutional networks is not so evident. We argue that there are two reasons that could probably explain this result. First the current network architectures (e.g. Two-stream ConvNets) are relatively shallow compared with those very deep models in image domain (e.g. VGGNet, GoogLeNet), and therefore their modeling capacity is constrained by their depth. Second, probably more importantly, the training dataset of action recognition is extremely small compared with the ImageNet dataset, and thus it will be easy to over-fit on the training dataset. To address these issues, this report presents very deep two-stream ConvNets for action recognition, by adapting recent very deep architectures into video domain. However, this extension is not easy as the size of action recognition is quite small. We design several good practices for the training of very deep two-stream ConvNets, namely (i) pre-training for both spatial and temporal nets, (ii) smaller learning rates, (iii) more data augmentation techniques, (iv) high drop out ratio. Meanwhile, we extend the Caffe toolbox into Multi-GPU implementation with high computational efficiency and low memory consumption. We verify the performance of very deep two-stream ConvNets on the dataset of UCF101 and it achieves the recognition accuracy of @math . Action recognition on large categories of unconstrained videos taken from the web is a very challenging problem compared to datasets like KTH (6 actions), IXMAS (13 actions), and Weizmann (10 actions). Challenges like camera motion, different viewpoints, large interclass variations, cluttered background, occlusions, bad illumination conditions, and poor quality of web videos cause the majority of the state-of-the-art action recognition approaches to fail. Also, an increased number of categories and the inclusion of actions with high confusion add to the challenges. In this paper, we propose using the scene context information obtained from moving and stationary pixels in the key frames, in conjunction with motion features, to solve the action recognition problem on a large (50 actions) dataset with videos from the web. We perform a combination of early and late fusion on multiple features to handle the very large number of categories. We demonstrate that scene context is a very important feature to perform action recognition on very large datasets. The proposed method does not require any kind of video stabilization, person detection, or tracking and pruning of features. Our approach gives good performance on a large number of action categories; it has been tested on the UCF50 dataset with 50 action categories, which is an extension of the UCF YouTube Action (UCF11) dataset containing 11 action categories. We also tested our approach on the KTH and HMDB51 datasets for comparison. Deep convolutional networks have achieved great success for visual recognition in still images. However, for action recognition in videos, the advantage over traditional methods is not so evident. This paper aims to discover the principles to design effective ConvNet architectures for action recognition in videos and learn these models given limited training samples. Our first contribution is temporal segment network (TSN), a novel framework for video-based action recognition. which is based on the idea of long-range temporal structure modeling. It combines a sparse temporal sampling strategy and video-level supervision to enable efficient and effective learning using the whole action video. The other contribution is our study on a series of good practices in learning ConvNets on video data with the help of temporal segment network. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on the datasets of HMDB51 ( @math ) and UCF101 ( @math ). We also visualize the learned ConvNet models, which qualitatively demonstrates the effectiveness of temporal segment network and the proposed good practices. Analyzing videos of human actions involves understanding the temporal relationships among video frames. State-of-the-art action recognition approaches rely on traditional optical flow estimation methods to pre-compute motion information for CNNs. Such a two-stage approach is computationally expensive, storage demanding, and not end-to-end trainable. In this paper, we present a novel CNN architecture that implicitly captures motion information between adjacent frames. We name our approach hidden two-stream CNNs because it only takes raw video frames as input and directly predicts action classes without explicitly computing optical flow. Our end-to-end approach is 10x faster than its two-stage baseline. Experimental results on four challenging action recognition datasets: UCF101, HMDB51, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.2 show that our approach significantly outperforms the previous best real-time approaches. Recently, deep learning approaches have demonstrated remarkable progresses for action recognition in videos. Most existing deep frameworks equally treat every volume i.e. spatial-temporal video clip, and directly assign a video label to all volumes sampled from it. However, within a video, discriminative actions may occur sparsely in a few key volumes, and most other volumes are irrelevant to the labeled action category. Training with a large proportion of irrelevant volumes will hurt performance. To address this issue, we propose a key volume mining deep framework to identify key volumes and conduct classification simultaneously. Specifically, our framework is trained is optimized in an alternative way integrated to the forward and backward stages of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). In the forward pass, our network mines key volumes for each action class. In the backward pass, it updates network parameters with the help of these mined key volumes. In addition, we propose "Stochastic out" to model key volumes from multi-modalities, and an effective yet simple "unsupervised key volume proposal" method for high quality volume sampling. Our experiments show that action recognition performance can be significantly improved by mining key volumes, and we achieve state-of-the-art performance on HMDB51 and UCF101 (93.1 ). We investigate architectures of discriminatively trained deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) for action recognition in video. The challenge is to capture the complementary information on appearance from still frames and motion between frames. We also aim to generalise the best performing hand-crafted features within a data-driven learning framework. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream ConvNet architecture which incorporates spatial and temporal networks. Second, we demonstrate that a ConvNet trained on multi-frame dense optical flow is able to achieve very good performance in spite of limited training data. Finally, we show that multitask learning, applied to two different action classification datasets, can be used to increase the amount of training data and improve the performance on both. Our architecture is trained and evaluated on the standard video actions benchmarks of UCF-101 and HMDB-51, where it is competitive with the state of the art. It also exceeds by a large margin previous attempts to use deep nets for video classification. Abstract The most successful video-based human action recognition methods rely on feature representations extracted using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Inspired by the two-stream network (TS-Net), we propose a multi-stream Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to recognize human actions. We additionally consider human-related regions that contain the most informative features. First, by improving foreground detection, the region of interest corresponding to the appearance and the motion of an actor can be detected robustly under realistic circumstances. Based on the entire detected human body, we construct one appearance and one motion stream. In addition, we select a secondary region that contains the major moving part of an actor based on motion saliency. By combining the traditional streams with the novel human-related streams, we introduce a human-related multi-stream CNN (HR-MSCNN) architecture that encodes appearance, motion, and the captured tubes of the human-related regions. Comparative evaluation on the JHMDB, HMDB51, UCF Sports and UCF101 datasets demonstrates that the streams contain features that complement each other. The proposed multi-stream architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on these four datasets. We describe a new approach to transfer knowledge across views for action recognition by using examples from a large collection of unlabelled mocap data. We achieve this by directly matching purely motion based features from videos to mocap. Our approach recovers 3D pose sequences without performing any body part tracking. We use these matches to generate multiple motion projections and thus add view invariance to our action recognition model. We also introduce a closed form solution for approximate non-linear Circulant Temporal Encoding (nCTE), which allows us to efficiently perform the matches in the frequency domain. We test our approach on the challenging unsupervised modality of the IXMAS dataset, and use publicly available motion capture data for matching. Without any additional annotation effort, we are able to significantly outperform the current state of the art. We investigate architectures of discriminatively trained deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) for action recognition in video. The challenge is to capture the complementary information on appearance from still frames and motion between frames. We also aim to generalise the best performing hand-crafted features within a data-driven learning framework. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream ConvNet architecture which incorporates spatial and temporal networks. Second, we demonstrate that a ConvNet trained on multi-frame dense optical flow is able to achieve very good performance in spite of limited training data. Finally, we show that multi-task learning, applied to two different action classification datasets, can be used to increase the amount of training data and improve the performance on both. Our architecture is trained and evaluated on the standard video actions benchmarks of UCF-101 and HMDB-51, where it is competitive with the state of the art. It also exceeds by a large margin previous attempts to use deep nets for video classification. Most state-of-the-art methods for action recognition rely on a two-stream architecture that processes appearance and motion independently. In this paper, we claim that considering them jointly offers rich information for action recognition. We introduce a novel representation that gracefully encodes the movement of some semantic keypoints. We use the human joints as these keypoints and term our Pose moTion representation PoTion. Specifically, we first run a state-of-the-art human pose estimator [4] and extract heatmaps for the human joints in each frame. We obtain our PoTion representation by temporally aggregating these probability maps. This is achieved by 'colorizing' each of them depending on the relative time of the frames in the video clip and summing them. This fixed-size representation for an entire video clip is suitable to classify actions using a shallow convolutional neural network. Our experimental evaluation shows that PoTion outperforms other state-of-the-art pose representations [6, 48]. Furthermore, it is complementary to standard appearance and motion streams. When combining PoTion with the recent two-stream I3D approach [5], we obtain state-of-the-art performance on the JHMDB, HMDB and UCF101 datasets. Deep convolutional networks have achieved great success for visual recognition in still images. However, for action recognition in videos, the advantage over traditional methods is not so evident. This paper aims to discover the principles to design effective ConvNet architectures for action recognition in videos and learn these models given limited training samples. Our first contribution is temporal segment network (TSN), a novel framework for video-based action recognition. which is based on the idea of long-range temporal structure modeling. It combines a sparse temporal sampling strategy and video-level supervision to enable efficient and effective learning using the whole action video. The other contribution is our study on a series of good practices in learning ConvNets on video data with the help of temporal segment network. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on the datasets of HMDB51 ( ( 69.4 , )) and UCF101 ( ( 94.2 , )). We also visualize the learned ConvNet models, which qualitatively demonstrates the effectiveness of temporal segment network and the proposed good practices (Models and code at https: github.com yjxiong temporal-segment-networks). Most of the previous work on video action recognition use complex hand-designed local features, such as SIFT, HOG and SURF, but these approaches are implemented sophisticatedly and difficult to be extended to other sensor modalities. Recent studies discover that there are no universally best hand-engineered features for all datasets, and learning features directly from the data may be more advantageous. One such endeavor is Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) proposed by Wiskott and Sejnowski [33]. SFA can learn the invariant and slowly varying features from input signals and has been proved to be valuable in human action recognition [34]. It is also observed that the multi-layer feature representation has succeeded remarkably in widespread machine learning applications. In this paper, we propose to combine SFA with deep learning techniques to learn hierarchical representations from the video data itself. Specifically, we use a two-layered SFA learning structure with 3D convolution and max pooling operations to scale up the method to large inputs and capture abstract and structural features from the video. Thus, the proposed method is suitable for action recognition. At the same time, sharing the same merits of deep learning, the proposed method is generic and fully automated. Our classification results on Hollywood2, KTH and UCF Sports are competitive with previously published results. To highlight some, on the KTH dataset, our recognition rate shows approximately 1 improvement in comparison to state-of-the-art methods even without supervision or dense sampling. Action recognition in uncontrolled video is an important and challenging computer vision problem. Recent progress in this area is due to new local features and models that capture spatio-temporal structure between local features, or human-object interactions. Instead of working towards more complex models, we focus on the low-level features and their encoding. We evaluate the use of Fisher vectors as an alternative to bag-of-word histograms to aggregate a small set of state-of-the-art low-level descriptors, in combination with linear classifiers. We present a large and varied set of evaluations, considering (i) classification of short actions in five datasets, (ii) localization of such actions in feature-length movies, and (iii) large-scale recognition of complex events. We find that for basic action recognition and localization MBH features alone are enough for state-of-the-art performance. For complex events we find that SIFT and MFCC features provide complementary cues. On all three problems we obtain state-of-the-art results, while using fewer features and less complex models. This paper presents an approach for human action recognition by finding the discriminative key frames from a video sequence and representing them with the distribution of local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. In this approach, the key frames of the video sequence are selected by their discriminative power and represented by the local motion features detected in them and integrated from their temporal neighbors. In the key frame’s representation, the spatial arrangements of the motion features are captured in a hierarchical spatial pyramid structure. By using frame by frame voting for the recognition, experiments have demonstrated improved performances over most of the other known methods on the popular benchmark data sets. Recognizinghumanactionfromimagesequencesis an appealingyet challengingproblem in computer vision with many applications including motion capture, human-computer interaction, environment control, and security surveillance. In this paper, we focus on recognizing the activities of a person in an image sequence from local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. Our approach is motivated by the recent success of “bag-of-words” model for general object recognition in computer vision[21, 14]. This representation, which is adapted from the text retrieval literature, models the object by the distribution of words from a fixed visual code book, which is usually obtained by vector quantization of local image visual features. However, this method discards the spatial and the temporal relations among these visual features, which could be helpful in object recognition. Addressing this problem, our approach uses a hierarchical representation for the key frames of a given video sequence to integrate information from both the spatial and the temporal domains. We first apply a spatiotemporal feature detector to the video sequence and obtain the local motion features. Then we generate a visual word code book by quantization of the local motion features and assign a word label to each of them. Next we select key frames of the video sequence by their discriminative power. Then, for each key frame, we integrate the visual words from its nearby frames, divide the key frame spatially into finer subdivisions and compute in each cell the histograms of the visual words detected in this key frame and its temporal neighbors. Finally, we concatenate the histograms from all cells and use Even with the recent advances in convolutional neural networks (CNN) in various visual recognition tasks, the state-of-the-art action recognition system still relies on hand crafted motion feature such as optical flow to achieve the best performance. We propose a multitask learning model ActionFlowNet to train a single stream network directly from raw pixels to jointly estimate optical flow while recognizing actions with convolutional neural networks, capturing both appearance and motion in a single model. We additionally provide insights to how the quality of the learned optical flow affects the action recognition. Our model significantly improves action recognition accuracy by a large margin 31 compared to state-of-the-art CNN-based action recognition models trained without external large scale data and additional optical flow input. Without pretraining on large external labeled datasets, our model, by well exploiting the motion information, achieves competitive recognition accuracy to the models trained with large labeled datasets such as ImageNet and Sport-1M. HighlightsEffective method to recognize human actions using 3D skeleton joints.New action feature descriptor, EigenJoints, for action recognition.Accumulated Motion Energy (AME) method to perform informative frames selection.Our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective method to recognize human actions using 3D skeleton joints recovered from 3D depth data of RGBD cameras. We design a new action feature descriptor for action recognition based on differences of skeleton joints, i.e., EigenJoints which combine action information including static posture, motion property, and overall dynamics. Accumulated Motion Energy (AME) is then proposed to perform informative frame selection, which is able to remove noisy frames and reduce computational cost. We employ non-parametric Naive-Bayes-Nearest-Neighbor (NBNN) to classify multiple actions. The experimental results on several challenging datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we investigate how many frames are necessary for our method to perform classification in the scenario of online action recognition. We observe that the first 30-40 frames are sufficient to achieve comparable results to that using the entire video sequences on the MSR Action3D dataset. In this paper we propose a novel method for human action recognition based on boosted key-frame selection and correlated pyramidal motion feature representations. Instead of using an unsupervised method to detect interest points, a Pyramidal Motion Feature (PMF), which combines optical flow with a biologically inspired feature, is extracted from each frame of a video sequence. The AdaBoost learning algorithm is then applied to select the most discriminative frames from a large feature pool. In this way, we obtain the top-ranked boosted frames of each video sequence as the key frames which carry the most representative motion information. Furthermore, we utilise the correlogram which focuses not only on probabilistic distributions within one frame but also on the temporal relationships of the action sequence. In the classification phase, a Support-Vector Machine (SVM) is adopted as the final classifier for human action recognition. To demonstrate generalizability, our method has been systematically tested on a variety of datasets and shown to be more effective and accurate for action recognition compared to the previous work. We obtain overall accuracies of: 95.5 , 93.7 , and 36.5 with our proposed method on the KTH, the multiview IXMAS and the challenging HMDB51 datasets, respectively. Human action recognition is an important topic in computer vision. Despite the satisfactory accuracies achieved by a number of methods, they often need computationally heavy algorithms to obtain the good accuracies and can only recognize one action in a short video. In this paper, we propose a real-time action recognition method that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both single-action and multi-action recognition. A new algorithm is proposed to detect key frames from a temporal window on the video frames. By analyzing only key frames instead of all frames, the recognition speed is improved. Furthermore, in order to guarantee the recognition accuracy, we employ Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to analyze the temporal relationship of the detected key frames. In the experiments, three public datasets, KTH, UCF Sports and s-KTH, are used to demonstrate the good performance of our proposed method on single-action and multi-action recognition.