Recognizing instances at varying scales simultaneously is a fundamental challenge in visual detection problems. While spatial multi-scale modeling has been well studied in object detection, how to effectively apply a multi-scale architecture to temporal models for activity detection is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify three unique challenges that need to be specifically handled for temporal activity detection. To address all these issues, we propose Dynamic Temporal Pyramid Network (DTPN), a new activity detection framework with a multi-scale pyramidal architecture featuring three novel designs: (1) We sample frame sequence dynamically with different frame per seconds (FPS) to construct a natural pyramidal representation for arbitrary-length input videos. (2) We design a two-branch multi-scale temporal feature hierarchy to deal with the inherent temporal scale variation of activity instances. (3) We further exploit the temporal context of activities by appropriately fusing multi-scale feature maps, and demonstrate that both local and global temporal contexts are important. By combining all these components into a uniform network, we end up with a single-shot activity detector involving single-pass inferencing and end-to-end training. Extensive experiments show that the proposed DTPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ActvityNet dataset.
@cite_18: We address the problem of activity detection in continuous, untrimmed video streams. This is a difficult task that requires extracting meaningful spatio-temporal features to capture activities, accurately localizing the start and end times of each activity. We introduce a new model, Region Convolutional 3D Network (R-C3D), which encodes the video streams using a three-dimensional fully convolutional network, then generates candidate temporal regions containing activities, and finally classifies selected regions into specific activities. Computation is saved due to the sharing of convolutional features between the proposal and the classification pipelines. The entire model is trained end-to-end with jointly optimized localization and classification losses. R-C3D is faster than existing methods (569 frames per second on a single Titan X Maxwell GPU) and achieves state-of-the-art results on THUMOS’14. We further demonstrate that our model is a general activity detection framework that does not rely on assumptions about particular dataset properties by evaluating our approach on ActivityNet and Charades. Our code is available at http: ai.bu.edu r-c3d
@cite_14: 
@cite_33: We address temporal action localization in untrimmed long videos. This is important because videos in real applications are usually unconstrained and contain multiple action instances plus video content of background scenes or other activities. To address this challenging issue, we exploit the effectiveness of deep networks in temporal action localization via three segment-based 3D ConvNets: (1) a proposal network identifies candidate segments in a long video that may contain actions, (2) a classification network learns one-vs-all action classification model to serve as initialization for the localization network, and (3) a localization network fine-tunes the learned classification network to localize each action instance. We propose a novel loss function for the localization network to explicitly consider temporal overlap and achieve high temporal localization accuracy. In the end, only the proposal network and the localization network are used during prediction. On two largescale benchmarks, our approach achieves significantly superior performances compared with other state-of-the-art systems: mAP increases from 1.7 to 7.4 on MEXaction2 and increases from 15.0 to 19.0 on THUMOS 2014.
@cite_22: Our paper presents a new approach for temporal detection of human actions in long, untrimmed video sequences. We introduce Single-Stream Temporal Action Proposals (SST), a new effective and efficient deep architecture for the generation of temporal action proposals. Our network can run continuously in a single stream over very long input video sequences, without the need to divide input into short overlapping clips or temporal windows for batch processing. We demonstrate empirically that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the task of temporal action proposal generation, while achieving some of the fastest processing speeds in the literature. Finally, we demonstrate that using SST proposals in conjunction with existing action classifiers results in improved state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.
@cite_28: Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging problem. Given a long, untrimmed video consisting of multiple action instances and complex background contents, we need not only to recognize their action categories, but also to localize the start time and end time of each instance. Many state-of-the-art systems use segment-level classifiers to select and rank proposal segments of pre-determined boundaries. However, a desirable model should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. To this end, we design a novel Convolutional-De-Convolutional (CDC) network that places CDC filters on top of 3D ConvNets, which have been shown to be effective for abstracting action semantics but reduce the temporal length of the input data. The proposed CDC filter performs the required temporal upsampling and spatial downsampling operations simultaneously to predict actions at the frame-level granularity. It is unique in jointly modeling action semantics in space-time and fine-grained temporal dynamics. We train the CDC network in an end-to-end manner efficiently. Our model not only achieves superior performance in detecting actions in every frame, but also significantly boosts the precision of localizing temporal boundaries. Finally, the CDC network demonstrates a very high efficiency with the ability to process 500 frames per second on a single GPU server. Source code and trained models are available online at https: bitbucket.org columbiadvmm cdc.
@cite_29: Detecting actions in untrimmed videos is an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we present the structured segment network (SSN), a novel framework which models the temporal structure of each action instance via a structured temporal pyramid. On top of the pyramid, we further introduce a decomposed discriminative model comprising two classifiers, respectively for classifying actions and determining completeness. This allows the framework to effectively distinguish positive proposals from background or incomplete ones, thus leading to both accurate recognition and localization. These components are integrated into a unified network that can be efficiently trained in an end-to-end fashion. Additionally, a simple yet effective temporal action proposal scheme, dubbed temporal actionness grouping (TAG) is devised to generate high quality action proposals. On two challenging benchmarks, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet, our method remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior accuracy and strong adaptivity in handling actions with various temporal structures.
@cite_3: The goal of this paper is event detection and recounting using a representation of concept detector scores. Different from existing work, which encodes videos by averaging concept scores over all frames, we propose to encode videos using fragments that are discriminatively learned per event. Our bag-of-fragments split a video into semantically coherent fragment proposals. From training video proposals we show how to select the most discriminative fragment for an event. An encoding of a video is in turn generated by matching and pooling these discriminative fragments to the fragment proposals of the video. The bag-of-fragments forms an effective encoding for event detection and is able to provide a precise temporally localized event recounting. Furthermore, we show how bag-of-fragments can be extended to deal with irrelevant concepts in the event recounting. Experiments on challenging web videos show that i) our modest number of fragment proposals give a high sub-event recall, ii) bag-of-fragments is complementary to global averaging and provides better event detection, iii) bag-of-fragments with concept filtering yields a desirable event recounting. We conclude that fragments matter for video event detection and recounting.
@cite_2: State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [7] and Fast R-CNN [5] have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully-convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. RPNs are trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. With a simple alternating optimization, RPN and Fast R-CNN can be trained to share convolutional features. For the very deep VGG-16 model [19], our detection system has a frame rate of 5fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007 (73.2 mAP) and 2012 (70.4 mAP) using 300 proposals per image. Code is available at https: github.com ShaoqingRen faster_rcnn.
@cite_17: Temporal action detection in long videos is an important problem. State-of-the-art methods address this problem by applying action classifiers on sliding windows. Although sliding windows may contain an identifiable portion of the actions, they may not necessarily cover the entire action instance, which would lead to inferior performance. We adapt a two-stage temporal action detection pipeline with Cascaded Boundary Regression (CBR) model. Class-agnostic proposals and specific actions are detected respectively in the first and the second stage. CBR uses temporal coordinate regression to refine the temporal boundaries of the sliding windows. The salient aspect of the refinement process is that, inside each stage, the temporal boundaries are adjusted in a cascaded way by feeding the refined windows back to the system for further boundary refinement. We test CBR on THUMOS-14 and TVSeries, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. The performance gain is especially remarkable under high IoU thresholds, e.g. map@tIoU=0.5 on THUMOS-14 is improved from 19.0 to 31.0 .
Previous works on activity detection mainly use sliding windows as candidates and classify video clips inside the window with activity classifiers trained on multiple features @cite_3 . Many recent works adopt a proposal-plus-classification framework @cite_22 @cite_28 @cite_33 @cite_29 @cite_17 by generating segment proposals and classifying activity categories for each proposal: some of them focus on designing better proposal schemes @cite_22 @cite_29 @cite_17 , while others focus on building more accurate activity classifiers @cite_28 @cite_33 @cite_29 . Along this line of attack, Xu @cite_18 proposed an end-to-end trainable activity detector based on Faster-RCNN @cite_2 . Buch @cite_14 investigated the use of gated recurrent memory module in a single-stream temporal detection framework. However, all these methods rely on feature maps with a fixed temporal resolution and fail to utilize a multi-scale pyramidal architecture for handling instances with varying temporal scales.