We present Temporal Aggregation Network (TAN) which decomposes 3D convolutions into spatial and temporal aggregation blocks. By stacking spatial and temporal convolutions repeatedly, TAN forms a deep hierarchical representation for capturing spatio-temporal information in videos. Since we do not apply 3D convolutions in each layer but only apply temporal aggregation blocks once after each spatial downsampling layer in the network, we significantly reduce the model complexity. The use of dilated convolutions at different resolutions of the network helps in aggregating multi-scale spatio-temporal information efficiently. Experiments show that our model is well suited for dense multi-label action recognition, which is a challenging sub-topic of action recognition that requires predicting multiple action labels in each frame. We outperform state-of-the-art methods by 5 and 3 on the Charades and Multi-THUMOS dataset respectively.
@cite_38: 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.
@cite_47: 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.
@cite_2: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been regarded as a powerful class of models for image recognition problems. Nevertheless, it is not trivial when utilizing a CNN for learning spatio-temporal video representation. A few studies have shown that performing 3D convolutions is a rewarding approach to capture both spatial and temporal dimensions in videos. However, the development of a very deep 3D CNN from scratch results in expensive computational cost and memory demand. A valid question is why not recycle off-the-shelf 2D networks for a 3D CNN. In this paper, we devise multiple variants of bottleneck building blocks in a residual learning framework by simulating @math convolutions with @math convolutional filters on spatial domain (equivalent to 2D CNN) plus @math convolutions to construct temporal connections on adjacent feature maps in time. Furthermore, we propose a new architecture, named Pseudo-3D Residual Net (P3D ResNet), that exploits all the variants of blocks but composes each in different placement of ResNet, following the philosophy that enhancing structural diversity with going deep could improve the power of neural networks. Our P3D ResNet achieves clear improvements on Sports-1M video classification dataset against 3D CNN and frame-based 2D CNN by 5.3 and 1.8 , respectively. We further examine the generalization performance of video representation produced by our pre-trained P3D ResNet on five different benchmarks and three different tasks, demonstrating superior performances over several state-of-the-art techniques.
Meanwhile, researchers started to design novel deep architectures specifically for video tasks. @cite_47 first proposed to utilize 3D convolution, which naturally extends convolutional filters to temporal domain. Then, @cite_38 proposed to build a 3D convolution variant of inception architecture and trained on a newly collected large-scale dataset of actions. This network achieved impressive performances on multiple benchmarks but was computationally costly. Very recently, @cite_2 proposed P3D to simplify 3D convolutions with 2D convolutional filters in the spatial domain followed by 1D convolutional filters in the temporal domain. This method is most relevant to proposed work. We also decompose 3D convolutions into separate spatial and temporal convolutions. However, unlike P3D, which replaces 3D convolution with 2D + 1D convolutions, we design a dedicated temporal aggregation block to capture context among multiple temporal levels and meanwhile preserving the temporal resolution. We only place a single layer of temporal block after each downsampling layer to reduce the filters needed for performing video recognition tasks. By stacking these two types of blocks repeatedly, we effectively capture appearance and spatio-temporal motion pattern which is important for localization tasks in videos.