In this paper, we address the challenging problem of spatial and temporal action detection in videos. We first develop an effective approach to localize frame-level action regions through integrating static and kinematic information by the early- and late-fusion detection scheme. With the intention of exploring important temporal connections among the detected action regions, we propose a tracking-by-point-matching algorithm to stitch the discrete action regions into a continuous spatio-temporal action tube. Recurrent 3D convolutional neural network is used to predict action categories and determine temporal boundaries of the generated tubes. We then introduce an action footprint map to refine the candidate tubes based on the action-specific spatial characteristics preserved in the convolutional layers of R3DCNN. In the extensive experiments, our method achieves superior detection results on the three public benchmark datasets: UCFSports, J-HMDB and UCF101.
@cite_38: The Fisher vector (FV) representation is a high-dimensional extension of the popular bag-of-word representation. Transformation of the FV by power and L2 normalizations has shown to significantly improve its performance, and led to state-of-the-art results for a range of image and video classification and retrieval tasks. These normalizations, however, render the representation non-additive over local descriptors. Combined with its high dimensionality, this makes the FV computationally expensive for the purpose of localization tasks. In this paper we present approximations to both these normalizations, which yield significant improvements in the memory and computational costs of the FV when used for localization. Second, we show how these approximations can be used to define upper-bounds on the score function that can be efficiently evaluated, which enables the use of branch-and-bound search as an alternative to exhaustive sliding window search. We present experimental evaluation results on classification and temporal localization of actions in videos. These show that the our approximations lead to a speedup of at least one order of magnitude, while maintaining state-of-the-art action recognition and localization performance.
@cite_56: This paper considers the problem of action localization, where the objective is to determine when and where certain actions appear. We introduce a sampling strategy to produce 2D+t sequences of bounding boxes, called tubelets. Compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, this drastically reduces the number of hypotheses that are likely to include the action of interest. Our method is inspired by a recent technique introduced in the context of image localization. Beyond considering this technique for the first time for videos, we revisit this strategy for 2D+t sequences obtained from super-voxels. Our sampling strategy advantageously exploits a criterion that reflects how action related motion deviates from background motion. We demonstrate the interest of our approach by extensive experiments on two public datasets: UCF Sports and MSR-II. Our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on both datasets, while restricting the search of actions to a fraction of possible bounding box sequences.
@cite_45: 
@cite_50: Deformable part models have achieved impressive performance for object detection, even on difficult image datasets. This paper explores the generalization of deformable part models from 2D images to 3D spatiotemporal volumes to better study their effectiveness for action detection in video. Actions are treated as spatiotemporal patterns and a deformable part model is generated for each action from a collection of examples. For each action model, the most discriminative 3D sub volumes are automatically selected as parts and the spatiotemporal relations between their locations are learned. By focusing on the most distinctive parts of each action, our models adapt to intra-class variation and show robustness to clutter. Extensive experiments on several video datasets demonstrate the strength of spatiotemporal DPMs for classifying and localizing actions.
@cite_15: In this paper, we address the challenging problem of effi- cient temporal activity detection in untrimmed long videos. While most recent work has focused and advanced the de- tection accuracy, the inference time can take seconds to minutes in processing one video, which is computationally prohibitive for many applications with tight runtime con- straints. This motivates our proposed budget-aware frame- work, which learns to perform activity detection by intel- ligently selecting a small subset of frames according to a specified time or computational budget. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process, and adopt a recurrent network to model a policy for the frame selec- tion. To train the network, we employ a recurrent policy gradient approach to approximate the gradient of the non- decomposable and non-differentiable objective defined in our problem. In the extensive experiments on two bench- mark datasets, we achieve competitive detection accuracy, and more importantly, our approach is able to substantially reduce computational time and detect multiple activities in only 348ms for each untrimmed long video of THUMOS14 and ActivityNet.
@cite_13: 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.
@cite_12: 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_20: We investigate the feature design and classification architectures in temporal action localization. This application focuses on detecting and labeling actions in untrimmed videos, which brings more challenge than classifying presegmented videos. The major difficulty for action localization is the uncertainty of action occurrence and utilization of information from different scales. Two innovations are proposed to address this issue. First, we propose a Pyramid of Score Distribution Feature (PSDF) to capture the motion information at multiple resolutions centered at each detection window. This novel feature mitigates the influence of unknown action position and duration, and shows significant performance gain over previous detection approaches. Second, inter-frame consistency is further explored by incorporating PSDF into the state-of-the-art Recurrent Neural Networks, which gives additional performance gain in detecting actions in temporally untrimmed videos. We tested our action localization framework on the THUMOS'15 and MPII Cooking Activities Dataset, both of which show a large performance improvement over previous attempts.
For action detection in videos, most research focuses on either spatial or temporal detection. To localize actions in spatial, Yu and Yuan @cite_13 integrated the actionness score with a greedy method to generate action proposals on individual frames. @cite_56 computed spatio-temporal bounding boxes by merging a hierarchy of supervoxels and classified the candidate boxes by motion features. @cite_50 extended the deformable part models to videos for spatial action detection. To determine the temporal boundaries of actions, a sliding window approach was introduced in @cite_20 to build pyramid representations in order to capture motion information at multiple resolutions. @cite_38 proposed to replace the sliding window approach with a more efficient branch-and-bound search. @cite_45 introduced a temporal segment proposal algorithm based on C3D and LSTM. R-C3D was proposed in @cite_12 to save computational costs by sharing convolutional features between proposal and classification stages. A recurrent policy network was recently developed to perform temporal action detection within a time budget @cite_15 .