In this paper, we address the problem of searching action proposals in unconstrained video clips. Our approach starts from actionness estimation on frame-level bounding boxes, and then aggregates the bounding boxes belonging to the same actor across frames via linking, associating, tracking to generate spatial-temporal continuous action paths. To achieve the target, a novel actionness estimation method is firstly proposed by utilizing both human appearance and motion cues. Then, the association of the action paths is formulated as a maximum set coverage problem with the results of actionness estimation as a priori. To further promote the performance, we design an improved optimization objective for the problem and provide a greedy search algorithm to solve it. Finally, a tracking-by-detection scheme is designed to further refine the searched action paths. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, UCF-Sports and UCF-101, show that the proposed approach advances state-of-the-art proposal generation performance in terms of both accuracy and proposal quantity.
In this paper we target at generating generic action proposals in unconstrained videos. Each action proposal corresponds to a temporal series of spatial bounding boxes, i.e., a spatio-temporal video tube, which has a good potential to locate one human action. Assuming each action is performed by a human with meaningful motion, both appearance and motion cues are utilized to measure the actionness of the video tubes. After picking those spatiotemporal paths of high actionness scores, our action proposal generation is formulated as a maximum set coverage problem, where greedy search is performed to select a set of action proposals that can maximize the overall actionness score. Compared with existing action proposal approaches, our action proposals do not rely on video segmentation and can be generated in nearly real-time. Experimental results on two challenging datasets, MSRII and UCF 101, validate the superior performance of our action proposals as well as competitive results on action detection and search. We propose an effective approach for spatio-temporal action localization in realistic videos. The approach first detects proposals at the frame-level and scores them with a combination of static and motion CNN features. It then tracks high-scoring proposals throughout the video using a tracking-by-detection approach. Our tracker relies simultaneously on instance-level and class-level detectors. The tracks are scored using a spatio-temporal motion histogram, a descriptor at the track level, in combination with the CNN features. Finally, we perform temporal localization of the action using a sliding-window approach at the track level. We present experimental results for spatio-temporal localization on the UCF-Sports, J-HMDB and UCF-101 action localization datasets, where our approach outperforms the state of the art with a margin of 15 , 7 and 12 respectively in mAP. 