Video recognition models have progressed significantly over the past few years, evolving from shallow classifiers trained on hand-crafted features to deep spatiotemporal networks. However, labeled video data required to train such models have not been able to keep up with the ever-increasing depth and sophistication of these networks. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to learning video representations that require no semantically labeled videos and instead leverages the years of effort in collecting and labeling large and clean still-image datasets. We do so by using state-of-the-art models pre-trained on image datasets as "teachers" to train video models in a distillation framework. We demonstrate that our method learns truly spatiotemporal features, despite being trained only using supervision from still-image networks. Moreover, it learns good representations across different input modalities, using completely uncurated raw video data sources and with different 2D teacher models. Our method obtains strong transfer performance, outperforming standard techniques for bootstrapping video architectures with image-based models by 16 . We believe that our approach opens up new approaches for learning spatiotemporal representations from unlabeled video data.
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 ). Two-stream Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have shown strong performance for human action recognition in videos. Recently, Residual Networks (ResNets) have arisen as a new technique to train extremely deep architectures. In this paper, we introduce spatiotemporal ResNets as a combination of these two approaches. Our novel architecture generalizes ResNets for the spatiotemporal domain by introducing residual connections in two ways. First, we inject residual connections between the appearance and motion pathways of a two-stream architecture to allow spatiotemporal interaction between the two streams. Second, we transform pretrained image ConvNets into spatiotemporal networks by equipping these with learnable convolutional filters that are initialized as temporal residual connections and operate on adjacent feature maps in time. This approach slowly increases the spatiotemporal receptive field as the depth of the model increases and naturally integrates image ConvNet design principles. The whole model is trained end-to-end to allow hierarchical learning of complex spatiotemporal features. We evaluate our novel spatiotemporal ResNet using two widely used action recognition benchmarks where it exceeds the previous state-of-the-art. We propose a simple, yet effective approach for spatiotemporal feature learning using deep 3-dimensional convolutional networks (3D ConvNets) trained on a large scale supervised video dataset. Our findings are three-fold: 1) 3D ConvNets are more suitable for spatiotemporal feature learning compared to 2D ConvNets, 2) A homogeneous architecture with small 3x3x3 convolution kernels in all layers is among the best performing architectures for 3D ConvNets, and 3) Our learned features, namely C3D (Convolutional 3D), with a simple linear classifier outperform state-of-the-art methods on 4 different benchmarks and are comparable with current best methods on the other 2 benchmarks. In addition, the features are compact: achieving 52.8 accuracy on UCF101 dataset with only 10 dimensions and also very efficient to compute due to the fast inference of ConvNets. Finally, they are conceptually very simple and easy to train and use. The paucity of videos in current action classification datasets (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) has made it difficult to identify good video architectures, as most methods obtain similar performance on existing small-scale benchmarks. This paper re-evaluates state-of-the-art architectures in light of the new Kinetics Human Action Video dataset. Kinetics has two orders of magnitude more data, with 400 human action classes and over 400 clips per class, and is collected from realistic, challenging YouTube videos. We provide an analysis on how current architectures fare on the task of action classification on this dataset and how much performance improves on the smaller benchmark datasets after pre-training on Kinetics. We also introduce a new Two-Stream Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) that is based on 2D ConvNet inflation: filters and pooling kernels of very deep image classification ConvNets are expanded into 3D, making it possible to learn seamless spatio-temporal feature extractors from video while leveraging successful ImageNet architecture designs and even their parameters. We show that, after pre-training on Kinetics, I3D models considerably improve upon the state-of-the-art in action classification, reaching 80.9 on HMDB-51 and 98.0 on UCF-101.