Music videos are one of the most popular types of video streaming services, and instrument playing is among the most common scenes in such videos. In order to understand the instrument-playing scenes in the videos, it is important to know what instruments are played, when they are played, and where the playing actions occur in the scene. While audio-based recognition of instruments has been widely studied, the visual aspect of music instrument playing remains largely unaddressed in the literature. One of the main obstacles is the difficulty in collecting annotated data of the action locations for training-based methods. To address this issue, we propose a weakly supervised framework to find when and where the instruments are played in the videos. We propose using two auxiliary models: 1) a sound model and 2) an object model to provide supervision for training the instrument-playing action model. The sound model provides temporal supervisions, while the object model provides spatial supervisions. They together can simultaneously provide temporal and spatial supervisions. The resulting model only needs to analyze the visual part of a music video to deduce which, when, and where instruments are played. We found that the proposed method significantly improves localization accuracy. We evaluate the result of the proposed method temporally and spatially on a small dataset (a total of 5400 frames) that we manually annotated.
For the problem of action detection, most existing methods require that relevant portions of the action of interest in training videos have been manually annotated with bounding boxes. Some recent works tried to avoid tedious manual annotation , and proposed to automatically identify the relevant portions in training videos. However, these methods only concerned the identification in either spatial or temporal domain, and may get irrelevant contents from another domain. These irrelevant contents are usually undesirable in the training phase, which will lead to a degradation of the detection performance. This paper advances prior work by proposing a joint learning framework to simultaneously identify the spatial and temporal extents of the action of interest in training videos. To get pixel-level localization results, our method uses dense trajectories extracted from videos as local features to represent actions. We first present a trajectory split-and-merge algorithm to segment a video into the background and several separated foreground moving objects. In this algorithm, the inherent temporal smoothness of human actions is exploited to facilitate segmentation. Then, with the latent SVM framework on segmentation results, spatial and temporal extents of the action of interest are treated as latent variables that are inferred simultaneously with action recognition. Experiments on two challenging datasets show that action detection with our learned spatial and temporal extents is superior than state-of-the-art methods.