Video recognition models have progressed significantly over the past few years, evolving from shallow classifiers trained on hand-crafted features to deep spatiotemporal networks. However, labeled video data required to train such models have not been able to keep up with the ever-increasing depth and sophistication of these networks. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to learning video representations that require no semantically labeled videos and instead leverages the years of effort in collecting and labeling large and clean still-image datasets. We do so by using state-of-the-art models pre-trained on image datasets as "teachers" to train video models in a distillation framework. We demonstrate that our method learns truly spatiotemporal features, despite being trained only using supervision from still-image networks. Moreover, it learns good representations across different input modalities, using completely uncurated raw video data sources and with different 2D teacher models. Our method obtains strong transfer performance, outperforming standard techniques for bootstrapping video architectures with image-based models by 16 . We believe that our approach opens up new approaches for learning spatiotemporal representations from unlabeled video data.
Video understanding, specifically for the task of human action recognition, is a well studied problem in computer vision. Analogously to the progress of image-based recognition methods, which have advanced from hand-crafted features @cite_14 @cite_34 to modern deep networks @cite_2 @cite_11 @cite_32 , video understanding methods have also evolved from hand-designed models @cite_19 @cite_13 @cite_37 to deep spatiotemporal networks @cite_26 @cite_33 . However, while image based recognition has seen dramatic gains in accuracy, improvements in video analysis have been more modest. In the still-image domain, deep models have greatly benefited from the availability of well-labeled datasets, such as ImageNet @cite_12 or Places @cite_31 .
@cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_32 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_31 @cite_34 @cite_13 @cite_12 @cite_11
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The recognition of human activities is one of the key problems in video understanding. Action recognition is challenging even for specific categories of videos, such as sports, that contain only a small set of actions. Interestingly, sports videos are accompanied by detailed commentaries available online, which could be used to perform action annotation in a weakly-supervised setting. For the specific case of Cricket videos, we address the challenge of temporal segmentation and annotation of ctions with semantic descriptions. Our solution consists of two stages. In the first stage, the video is segmented into "scenes", by utilizing the scene category information extracted from text-commentary. The second stage consists of classifying video-shots as well as the phrases in the textual description into various categories. The relevant phrases are then suitably mapped to the video-shots. The novel aspect of this work is the fine temporal scale at which semantic information is assigned to the video. As a result of our approach, we enable retrieval of specific actions that last only a few seconds, from several hours of video. This solution yields a large number of labeled exemplars, with no manual effort, that could be used by machine learning algorithms to learn complex actions. Deep learning for human action recognition in videos is making significant progress, but is slowed down by its dependency on expensive manual labeling of large video collections. In this work, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for Procedural Human Action Videos. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We introduce a deep multi-task representation learning architecture to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF101 and HMDB51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, significantly outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos. Action recognition in videos is a challenging task due to the complexity of the spatio-temporal patterns to model and the difficulty to acquire and learn on large quantities of video data. Deep learning, although a breakthrough for image classification and showing promise for videos, has still not clearly superseded action recognition methods using hand-crafted features, even when training on massive datasets. In this paper, we introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of hand-crafted spatio-temporal features classified by supervised deep networks. As we show in our experiments on five popular benchmarks for action recognition, our hybrid model combines the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10000 short clips) and yet improves significantly on the state of the art, including recent deep models trained on millions of manually labelled images and videos. Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics, domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of applications from video surveillance to humancomputer interaction, scientific milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey, touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the reader. We provide a detailed review of the work on human action recognition over the past decade.We refer to actions as meaningful human motions.Including Hand-crafted representations methods, we review the impact of Deep-nets on action recognition.We follow a systematic taxonomy to highlight the essence of both Hand-crafted and Deep-net solutions.We present a comparison of methods at their algorithmic level and performance.