We consider the task of identifying human actions visible in online videos. We focus on the widely spread genre of lifestyle vlogs, which consist of videos of people performing actions while verbally describing them. Our goal is to identify if actions mentioned in the speech description of a video are visually present. We construct a dataset with crowdsourced manual annotations of visible actions, and introduce a multimodal algorithm that leverages information derived from visual and linguistic clues to automatically infer which actions are visible in a video. We demonstrate that our multimodal algorithm outperforms algorithms based only on one modality at a time.
The largest datasets that have been compiled to date are based on YouTube videos @cite_57 @cite_13 @cite_35 . These actions cover a broad range of classes including human-object interactions such as cooking @cite_9 @cite_59 @cite_11 and playing tennis @cite_55 , as well as human-human interactions such as shaking hands and hugging @cite_24 .
@cite_35 @cite_9 @cite_55 @cite_57 @cite_24 @cite_59 @cite_13 @cite_11
2619947201 1596841185 2016053056 1927052826 2949827582 1995820507 2019660985
We describe the DeepMind Kinetics human action video dataset. The dataset contains 400 human action classes, with at least 400 video clips for each action. Each clip lasts around 10s and is taken from a different YouTube video. The actions are human focussed and cover a broad range of classes including human-object interactions such as playing instruments, as well as human-human interactions such as shaking hands. We describe the statistics of the dataset, how it was collected, and give some baseline performance figures for neural network architectures trained and tested for human action classification on this dataset. We also carry out a preliminary analysis of whether imbalance in the dataset leads to bias in the classifiers. Humans can easily describe what they see in a coherent way and at varying level of detail. However, existing approaches for automatic video description focus on generating only single sentences and are not able to vary the descriptions’ level of detail. In this paper, we address both of these limitations: for a variable level of detail we produce coherent multi-sentence descriptions of complex videos. To understand the difference between detailed and short descriptions, we collect and analyze a video description corpus of three levels of detail. We follow a two-step approach where we first learn to predict a semantic representation (SR) from video and then generate natural language descriptions from it. For our multi-sentence descriptions we model across-sentence consistency at the level of the SR by enforcing a consistent topic. Human judges rate our descriptions as more readable, correct, and relevant than related work. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been established as a powerful class of models for image recognition problems. Encouraged by these results, we provide an extensive empirical evaluation of CNNs on large-scale video classification using a new dataset of 1 million YouTube videos belonging to 487 classes. We study multiple approaches for extending the connectivity of a CNN in time domain to take advantage of local spatio-temporal information and suggest a multiresolution, foveated architecture as a promising way of speeding up the training. Our best spatio-temporal networks display significant performance improvements compared to strong feature-based baselines (55.3 to 63.9 ), but only a surprisingly modest improvement compared to single-frame models (59.3 to 60.9 ). We further study the generalization performance of our best model by retraining the top layers on the UCF-101 Action Recognition dataset and observe significant performance improvements compared to the UCF-101 baseline model (63.3 up from 43.9 ). In spite of many dataset efforts for human action recognition, current computer vision algorithms are still severely limited in terms of the variability and complexity of the actions that they can recognize. This is in part due to the simplicity of current benchmarks, which mostly focus on simple actions and movements occurring on manually trimmed videos. In this paper we introduce ActivityNet, a new large-scale video benchmark for human activity understanding. Our benchmark aims at covering a wide range of complex human activities that are of interest to people in their daily living. In its current version, ActivityNet provides samples from 203 activity classes with an average of 137 untrimmed videos per class and 1.41 activity instances per video, for a total of 849 video hours. We illustrate three scenarios in which ActivityNet can be used to compare algorithms for human activity understanding: untrimmed video classification, trimmed activity classification and activity detection. This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6 mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding. The problem of describing images through natural language has gained importance in the computer vision community. Solutions to image description have either focused on a top-down approach of generating language through combinations of object detections and language models or bottom-up propagation of keyword tags from training images to test images through probabilistic or nearest neighbor techniques. In contrast, describing videos with natural language is a less studied problem. In this paper, we combine ideas from the bottom-up and top-down approaches to image description and propose a method for video description that captures the most relevant contents of a video in a natural language description. We propose a hybrid system consisting of a low level multimodal latent topic model for initial keyword annotation, a middle level of concept detectors and a high level module to produce final lingual descriptions. We compare the results of our system to human descriptions in both short and long forms on two datasets, and demonstrate that final system output has greater agreement with the human descriptions than any single level. While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.