We present a Temporal Context Network (TCN) for precise temporal localization of human activities. Similar to the Faster-RCNN architecture, proposals are placed at equal intervals in a video which span multiple temporal scales. We propose a novel representation for ranking these proposals. Since pooling features only inside a segment is not sufficient to predict activity boundaries, we construct a representation which explicitly captures context around a proposal for ranking it. For each temporal segment inside a proposal, features are uniformly sampled at a pair of scales and are input to a temporal convolutional neural network for classification. After ranking proposals, non-maximum suppression is applied and classification is performed to obtain final detections. TCN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the ActivityNet dataset and the THUMOS14 dataset.
Methods using category-independent classifiers to obtain many segments in a long video are more closely related to our approach. For example, @cite_4 exploit three segment-based 3D ConvNets: a proposal network for identifying candidate clips that may contain actions, a classification network for learning a classification model and a localization network for fine-tuning the learned classification network to localize each action instance. @cite_22 introduce Deep Action Proposals (DAPs) and use a LSTM to encode information in a fixed clip (512 frames) of a video. After encoding information in the video clip, the LSTM scores K (64) predefined start and end positions in that clip. The start and end positions are selected based on statistics of the video dataset. We show that our method performs better than global representations like LSTMs which create a single feature representation for all scales in a video for localization of activities. In contemporary work, @cite_8 proposed a convolutional-de-convolutional (CDC) network by combing temporal upsampling and spatial downsampling for activity detection. Such an architecture helps in precise localization of activity boundaries. We show that the activity proposals generated by our method can further improve CDC's performance.
@cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_8
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3-D convolutional neural networks (3-D-convNets) have been very recently proposed for action recognition in videos, and promising results are achieved. However, existing 3-D-convNets has two “artificial” requirements that may reduce the quality of video analysis: 1) It requires a fixed-sized (e.g., 112 @math 112) input video; and 2) most of the 3-D-convNets require a fixed-length input (i.e., video shots with fixed number of frames). To tackle these issues, we propose an end-to-end pipeline named Two-stream 3-D-convNet Fusion , which can recognize human actions in videos of arbitrary size and length using multiple features. Specifically, we decompose a video into spatial and temporal shots. By taking a sequence of shots as input, each stream is implemented using a spatial temporal pyramid pooling (STPP) convNet with a long short-term memory (LSTM) or CNN-E model, softmax scores of which are combined by a late fusion. We devise the STPP convNet to extract equal-dimensional descriptions for each variable-size shot, and we adopt the LSTM CNN-E model to learn a global description for the input video using these time-varying descriptions. With these advantages, our method should improve all 3-D CNN-based video analysis methods. We empirically evaluate our method for action recognition in videos and the experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods (both 2-D and 3-D based) on three standard benchmark datasets (UCF101, HMDB51 and ACT datasets). Motivated by the success of data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in object recognition on static images, researchers are working hard towards developing CNN equivalents for learning video features. However, learning video features globally has proven to be quite a challenge due to its high dimensionality, the lack of labelled data and the difficulty in processing large-scale video data. Therefore, we propose to leverage effective techniques from both data-driven and data-independent approaches to improve action recognition system. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream Stacked Convolutional Independent Subspace Analysis (ConvISA) architecture to show that unsupervised learning methods can significantly boost the performance of traditional local features extracted from data-independent models. Second, we demonstrate that by learning on video volumes detected by Improved Dense Trajectory (IDT), we can seamlessly combine our novel local descriptors with hand-crafted descriptors. Thus we can utilize available feature enhancing techniques developed for hand-crafted descriptors. Finally, similar to multi-class classification framework in CNNs, we propose a training-free re-ranking technique that exploits the relationship among action classes to improve the overall performance. Our experimental results on four benchmark action recognition datasets show significantly improved performance. Abstract We present VideoLSTM for end-to-end sequence learning of actions in video. Rather than adapting the video to the peculiarities of established recurrent or convolutional architectures, we adapt the architecture to fit the requirements of the video medium. Starting from the soft-Attention LSTM, VideoLSTM makes three novel contributions. First, video has a spatial layout. To exploit the spatial correlation we hardwire convolutions in the soft-Attention LSTM architecture. Second, motion not only informs us about the action content, but also guides better the attention towards the relevant spatio-temporal locations. We introduce motion-based attention. And finally, we demonstrate how the attention from VideoLSTM can be exploited for action localization by relying on the action class label and temporal attention smoothing. Experiments on UCF101, HMDB51 and THUMOS13 reveal the benefit of the video-specific adaptations of VideoLSTM in isolation as well as when integrated in a combined architecture. It compares favorably against other LSTM architectures for action classification and especially action localization. Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging problem. Given a long, untrimmed video consisting of multiple action instances and complex background contents, we need not only to recognize their action categories, but also to localize the start time and end time of each instance. Many state-of-the-art systems use segment-level classifiers to select and rank proposal segments of pre-determined boundaries. However, a desirable model should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. To this end, we design a novel Convolutional-De-Convolutional (CDC) network that places CDC filters on top of 3D ConvNets, which have been shown to be effective for abstracting action semantics but reduce the temporal length of the input data. The proposed CDC filter performs the required temporal upsampling and spatial downsampling operations simultaneously to predict actions at the frame-level granularity. It is unique in jointly modeling action semantics in space-time and fine-grained temporal dynamics. We train the CDC network in an end-to-end manner efficiently. Our model not only achieves superior performance in detecting actions in every frame, but also significantly boosts the precision of localizing temporal boundaries. Finally, the CDC network demonstrates a very high efficiency with the ability to process 500 frames per second on a single GPU server. Source code and trained models are available online at https: bitbucket.org columbiadvmm cdc.