Despite the rapid progress, existing works on action understanding focus strictly on one type of action agent, which we call actor---a human adult, ignoring the diversity of actions performed by other actors. To overcome this narrow viewpoint, our paper marks the first effort in the computer vision community to jointly consider algorithmic understanding of various types of actors undergoing various actions. To begin with, we collect a large annotated Actor-Action Dataset (A2D) that consists of 3782 short videos and 31 temporally untrimmed long videos. We formulate the general actor-action understanding problem and instantiate it at various granularities: video-level single- and multiple-label actor-action recognition, and pixel-level actor-action segmentation. We propose and examine a comprehensive set of graphical models that consider the various types of interplay among actors and actions. Our findings have led us to conclusive evidence that the joint modeling of actor and action improves performance over modeling each of them independently, and further improvement can be obtained by considering the multi-scale natural in video understanding. Hence, our paper concludes the argument of the value of explicit consideration of various actors in comprehensive action understanding and provides a dataset and a benchmark for later works exploring this new problem.
In addition to the increased diversity in acitivities, the literature in action understanding is moving away from simple video classification to fine-grained output. For example, methods like @cite_68 @cite_70 detect human actions with bounding box tubes or 3D volumes in videos; and methods like @cite_60 @cite_54 even provide pixel-level segmentation of human actions. The shift of research interest is also observed in the relaxed assumptions of videos. For instance, temporally untrimmed videos are considered in @cite_61 and @cite_46 , and online streaming videos are explored in @cite_2 and @cite_8 . Our work analyzes actors and actions at various granularities, e.g., both video-level and pixel-level, and we experiment with both short and long videos.
@cite_61 @cite_60 @cite_70 @cite_8 @cite_54 @cite_2 @cite_46 @cite_68
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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. The focus of the action understanding literature has predominately been classification, how- ever, there are many applications demanding richer action understanding such as mobile robotics and video search, with solutions to classification, localization and detection. In this paper, we propose a compositional model that leverages a new mid-level representation called compositional trajectories and a locally articulated spatiotemporal deformable parts model (LALSDPM) for fully action understanding. Our methods is advantageous in capturing the variable structure of dynamic human activity over a long range. First, the compositional trajectories capture long-ranging, frequently co-occurring groups of trajectories in space time and represent them in discriminative hierarchies, where human motion is largely separated from camera motion; second, LASTDPM learns a structured model with multi-layer deformable parts to capture multiple levels of articulated motion. We implement our methods and demonstrate state of the art performance on all three problems: action detection, localization, and recognition. We introduce an approach for spatio-temporal human action localization using sparse spatial supervision. Our method leverages the large amount of annotated humans available today and extracts human tubes by combining a state-of-the-art human detector with a tracking-by-detection approach. Given these high-quality human tubes and temporal supervision, we select positive and negative tubes with very sparse spatial supervision, i.e., only one spatially annotated frame per instance. The selected tubes allow us to effectively learn a spatio-temporal action detector based on dense trajectories or CNNs. We conduct experiments on existing action localization benchmarks: UCF-Sports, J-HMDB and UCF-101. Our results show that our approach, despite using sparse spatial supervision, performs on par with methods using full supervision, i.e., one bounding box annotation per frame. To further validate our method, we introduce DALY (Daily Action Localization in YouTube), a dataset for realistic action localization in space and time. It contains high quality temporal and spatial annotations for 3.6k instances of 10 actions in 31 hours of videos (3.3M frames). It is an order of magnitude larger than existing datasets, with more diversity in appearance and long untrimmed videos. Realistic videos of human actions exhibit rich spatiotemporal structures at multiple levels of granularity: an action can always be decomposed into multiple finer-grained elements in both space and time. To capture this intuition, we propose to represent videos by a hierarchy of mid-level action elements (MAEs), where each MAE corresponds to an action-related spatiotemporal segment in the video. We introduce an unsupervised method to generate this representation from videos. Our method is capable of distinguishing action-related segments from background segments and representing actions at multiple spatiotemporal resolutions. Given a set of spatiotemporal segments generated from the training data, we introduce a discriminative clustering algorithm that automatically discovers MAEs at multiple levels of granularity. We develop structured models that capture a rich set of spatial, temporal and hierarchical relations among the segments, where the action label and multiple levels of MAE labels are jointly inferred. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple action recognition benchmarks. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in real-world applications such as action recognition in large-scale untrimmed videos and action parsing.