In this paper, we address the challenging problem of effi- cient temporal activity detection in untrimmed long videos. While most recent work has focused and advanced the de- tection accuracy, the inference time can take seconds to minutes in processing one video, which is computationally prohibitive for many applications with tight runtime con- straints. This motivates our proposed budget-aware frame- work, which learns to perform activity detection by intel- ligently selecting a small subset of frames according to a specified time or computational budget. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process, and adopt a recurrent network to model a policy for the frame selec- tion. To train the network, we employ a recurrent policy gradient approach to approximate the gradient of the non- decomposable and non-differentiable objective defined in our problem. In the extensive experiments on two bench- mark datasets, we achieve competitive detection accuracy, and more importantly, our approach is able to substantially reduce computational time and detect multiple activities in only 348ms for each untrimmed long video of THUMOS14 and ActivityNet.
Another active research line is the spatio-temporal action detection, which focuses on localizing action regions over consecutive video frames. A number of methods have been proposed, from the spatio-temporal proposals such as supervoxels @cite_7 , the frame-level object detection followed by a linking or tracking algorithm @cite_2 , to the recent video SSD approach @cite_5 . However, these methods are mostly applied on short video snippets, in contrast, temporal activity detection targets at untrimmed videos that involve complex actions, objects and scenes evolving over long sequences. Therefore, efficient inference under a certain time budget is much in demand for the temporal activity detection task.
@cite_5 @cite_7 @cite_2
2949950219 2460134573 1923332106
Current state-of-the-art approaches for spatio-temporal action localization rely on detections at the frame level that are then linked or tracked across time. In this paper, we leverage the temporal continuity of videos instead of operating at the frame level. We propose the ACtion Tubelet detector (ACT-detector) that takes as input a sequence of frames and outputs tubelets, i.e., sequences of bounding boxes with associated scores. The same way state-of-the-art object detectors rely on anchor boxes, our ACT-detector is based on anchor cuboids. We build upon the SSD framework. Convolutional features are extracted for each frame, while scores and regressions are based on the temporal stacking of these features, thus exploiting information from a sequence. Our experimental results show that leveraging sequences of frames significantly improves detection performance over using individual frames. The gain of our tubelet detector can be explained by both more accurate scores and more precise localization. Our ACT-detector outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for frame-mAP and video-mAP on the J-HMDB and UCF-101 datasets, in particular at high overlap thresholds. This paper proposes a novel approach to tackle the challenging problem of 'online action localization' which entails predicting actions and their locations as they happen in a video. Typically, action localization or recognition is performed in an offline manner where all the frames in the video are processed together and action labels are not predicted for the future. This disallows timely localization of actions - an important consideration for surveillance tasks. In our approach, given a batch of frames from the immediate past in a video, we estimate pose and oversegment the current frame into superpixels. Next, we discriminatively train an actor foreground model on the superpixels using the pose bounding boxes. A Conditional Random Field with superpixels as nodes, and edges connecting spatio-temporal neighbors is used to obtain action segments. The action confidence is predicted using dynamic programming on SVM scores obtained on short segments of the video, thereby capturing sequential information of the actions. The issue of visual drift is handled by updating the appearance model and pose refinement in an online manner. Lastly, we introduce a new measure to quantify the performance of action prediction (i.e. online action localization), which analyzes how the prediction accuracy varies as a function of observed portion of the video. Our experiments suggest that despite using only a few frames to localize actions at each time instant, we are able to predict the action and obtain competitive results to state-of-the-art offline methods. We address the problem of action detection in videos. Driven by the latest progress in object detection from 2D images, we build action models using rich feature hierarchies derived from shape and kinematic cues. We incorporate appearance and motion in two ways. First, starting from image region proposals we select those that are motion salient and thus are more likely to contain the action. This leads to a significant reduction in the number of regions being processed and allows for faster computations. Second, we extract spatio-temporal feature representations to build strong classifiers using Convolutional Neural Networks. We link our predictions to produce detections consistent in time, which we call action tubes. We show that our approach outperforms other techniques in the task of action detection.