In contrast to the widely studied problem of recognizing an action given a complete sequence, action anticipation aims to identify the action from only partially available videos. As such, it is therefore key to the success of computer vision applications requiring to react as early as possible, such as autonomous navigation. In this paper, we propose a new action anticipation method that achieves high prediction accuracy even in the presence of a very small percentage of a video sequence. To this end, we develop a multi-stage LSTM architecture that leverages context-aware and action-aware features, and introduce a novel loss function that encourages the model to predict the correct class as early as possible. Our experiments on standard benchmark datasets evidence the benefits of our approach; We outperform the state-of-the-art action anticipation methods for early prediction by a relative increase in accuracy of 22.0 on JHMDB-21, 14.0 on UT-Interaction and 49.9 on UCF-101.
More recently, @cite_37 proposed to make use of binary SVMs to classify video snippets into sub-action categories and obtain the final class label in an online manner using dynamic programming. To overcome the need to train one classifier per sub-action, @cite_47 extended this approach to using a structural SVM. Importantly, this work further introduced a new objective function to encourage the score of the correct action to increase as time progresses.
@cite_37 @cite_47
2460134573 2560009937
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. This paper proposes a person-centric and online approach to the challenging problem of localization and prediction of actions and interactions in videos. Typically, localization or recognition is performed in an offline manner where all the frames in the video are processed together. This prevents timely localization and prediction of actions and interactions - an important consideration for many tasks including surveillance and human-machine interaction. In our approach, we estimate human poses at each frame and train discriminative appearance models using the superpixels inside the pose bounding boxes. Since the pose estimation per frame is inherently noisy, the conditional probability of pose hypotheses at current time-step (frame) is computed using pose estimations in the current frame and their consistency with poses in the previous frames. Next, both the superpixel and pose-based foreground likelihoods are used to infer the location of actors at each time through a Conditional Random. The issue of visual drift is handled by updating the appearance models, and refining poses using motion smoothness on joint locations, in an online manner. For online prediction of action (interaction) confidences, we propose an approach based on Structural SVM that operates on short video segments, and is trained with the objective that confidence of an action or interaction increases as time progresses. Lastly, we quantify the performance of both detection and prediction together, and analyze how the prediction accuracy varies as a time function of observed action (interaction) at different levels of detection performance. Our experiments on several datasets suggest that despite using only a few frames to localize actions (interactions) at each time instant, we are able to obtain competitive results to state-of-the-art offline methods.