In this work, we address the task of weakly-supervised human action segmentation in long, untrimmed videos. Recent methods have relied on expensive learning models, such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Hidden Markov Models (HMM). However, these methods suffer from expensive computational cost, thus are unable to be deployed in large scale. To overcome the limitations, the keys to our design are efficiency and scalability. We propose a novel action modeling framework, which consists of a new temporal convolutional network, named Temporal Convolutional Feature Pyramid Network (TCFPN), for predicting frame-wise action labels, and a novel training strategy for weakly-supervised sequence modeling, named Iterative Soft Boundary Assignment (ISBA), to align action sequences and update the network in an iterative fashion. The proposed framework is evaluated on two benchmark datasets, Breakfast and Hollywood Extended, with four different evaluation metrics. Extensive experimental results show that our methods achieve competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods.
We present an approach for weakly supervised learning of human actions. Given a set of videos and an ordered list of the occurring actions, the goal is to infer start and end frames of the related action classes within the video and to train the respective action classifiers without any need for hand labeled frame boundaries. To address this task, we propose a combination of a discriminative representation of subactions, modeled by a recurrent neural network, and a coarse probabilistic model to allow for a temporal alignment and inference over long sequences. While this system alone already generates good results, we show that the performance can be further improved by approximating the number of subactions to the characteristics of the different action classes. To this end, we adapt the number of subaction classes by iterating realignment and reestimation during training. The proposed system is evaluated on two benchmark datasets, the Breakfast and the Hollywood extended dataset, showing a competitive performance on various weak learning tasks such as temporal action segmentation and action alignment. We propose a weakly-supervised framework for action labeling in video, where only the order of occurring actions is required during training time. The key challenge is that the per-frame alignments between the input (video) and label (action) sequences are unknown during training. We address this by introducing the Extended Connectionist Temporal Classification (ECTC) framework to efficiently evaluate all possible alignments via dynamic programming and explicitly enforce their consistency with frame-to-frame visual similarities. This protects the model from distractions of visually inconsistent or degenerated alignments without the need of temporal supervision. We further extend our framework to the semi-supervised case when a few frames are sparsely annotated in a video. With less than 1 of labeled frames per video, our method is able to outperform existing semi-supervised approaches and achieve comparable performance to that of fully supervised approaches. Abstract We present an approach for weakly supervised learning of human actions from video transcriptions. Our system is based on the idea that, given a sequence of input data and a transcript, i.e. a list of the order the actions occur in the video, it is possible to infer the actions within the video stream and to learn the related action models without the need for any frame-based annotation. Starting from the transcript information at hand, we split the given data sequences uniformly based on the number of expected actions. We then learn action models for each class by maximizing the probability that the training video sequences are generated by the action models given the sequence order as defined by the transcripts. The learned model can be used to temporally segment an unseen video with or without transcript. Additionally, the inferred segments can be used as a starting point to train high-level fully supervised models. We evaluate our approach on four distinct activity datasets, namely Hollywood Extended, MPII Cooking, Breakfast and CRIM13. It shows that the proposed system is able to align the scripted actions with the video data, that the learned models localize and classify actions in the datasets, and that they outperform any current state-of-the-art approach for aligning transcripts with video data. We are given a set of video clips, each one annotated with an ordered list of actions, such as “walk” then “sit” then “answer phone” extracted from, for example, the associated text script. We seek to temporally localize the individual actions in each clip as well as to learn a discriminative classifier for each action. We formulate the problem as a weakly supervised temporal assignment with ordering constraints. Each video clip is divided into small time intervals and each time interval of each video clip is assigned one action label, while respecting the order in which the action labels appear in the given annotations. We show that the action label assignment can be determined together with learning a classifier for each action in a discriminative manner. We evaluate the proposed model on a new and challenging dataset of 937 video clips with a total of 787720 frames containing sequences of 16 different actions from 69 Hollywood movies.