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_30: Recent applications of Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) for human action recognition in videos have proposed different solutions for incorporating the appearance and motion information. We study a number of ways of fusing ConvNet towers both spatially and temporally in order to best take advantage of this spatio-temporal information. We make the following findings: (i) that rather than fusing at the softmax layer, a spatial and temporal network can be fused at a convolution layer without loss of performance, but with a substantial saving in parameters, (ii) that it is better to fuse such networks spatially at the last convolutional layer than earlier, and that additionally fusing at the class prediction layer can boost accuracy, finally (iii) that pooling of abstract convolutional features over spatiotemporal neighbourhoods further boosts performance. Based on these studies we propose a new ConvNet architecture for spatiotemporal fusion of video snippets, and evaluate its performance on standard benchmarks where this architecture achieves state-of-the-art results.
@cite_4: 
@cite_22: Models based on deep convolutional networks have dominated recent image interpretation tasks; we investigate whether models which are also recurrent, or "temporally deep", are effective for tasks involving sequences, visual and otherwise. We develop a novel recurrent convolutional architecture suitable for large-scale visual learning which is end-to-end trainable, and demonstrate the value of these models on benchmark video recognition tasks, image description and retrieval problems, and video narration challenges. In contrast to current models which assume a fixed spatio-temporal receptive field or simple temporal averaging for sequential processing, recurrent convolutional models are "doubly deep"' in that they can be compositional in spatial and temporal "layers". Such models may have advantages when target concepts are complex and or training data are limited. Learning long-term dependencies is possible when nonlinearities are incorporated into the network state updates. Long-term RNN models are appealing in that they directly can map variable-length inputs (e.g., video frames) to variable length outputs (e.g., natural language text) and can model complex temporal dynamics; yet they can be optimized with backpropagation. Our recurrent long-term models are directly connected to modern visual convnet models and can be jointly trained to simultaneously learn temporal dynamics and convolutional perceptual representations. Our results show such models have distinct advantages over state-of-the-art models for recognition or generation which are separately defined and or optimized.
@cite_40: In this paper we study 3D convolutional networks for video understanding tasks. Our starting point is the state-of-the-art I3D model, which "inflates" all the 2D filters of the Inception architecture to 3D. We first consider "deflating" the I3D model at various levels to understand the role of 3D convolutions. Interestingly, we found that 3D convolutions at the top layers of the network contribute more than 3D convolutions at the bottom layers, while also being computationally more efficient. This indicates that I3D is better at capturing high-level temporal patterns than low-level motion signals. We also consider replacing 3D convolutions with spatiotemporal-separable 3D convolutions (i.e., replacing convolution using a k * k * k filter with 1 * k * k followed by k * 1 * 1 filters); we show that such a model, which we call S3D, is 1.5x more computationally efficient (in terms of FLOPS) than I3D, and achieves better accuracy. Finally, we explore spatiotemporal feature gating on top of S3D. The resulting model, which we call S3D-G, outperforms the state-of-the-art I3D model by 3.5 accuracy on Kinetics and reduces the FLOPS by 34 . It also achieves a new state-of-the-art performance when transferred to other action classification (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) and detection (UCF-101 and JHMDB) datasets.
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@cite_47: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have emerged as a powerful model for a broad range of machine learning problems that involve sequential data. While an abundance of work exists to understand and improve RNNs in the context of language and audio signals such as language modeling and speech recognition, relatively little attention has been paid to analyze or modify RNNs for visual sequences, which by nature have distinct properties. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap and present the first large-scale exploration of RNNs for visual sequence learning. In particular, with the intention of leveraging the strong generalization capacity of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we propose a novel and effective approach, PreRNN, to make pre-trained CNNs recurrent by transforming convolutional layers or fully connected layers into recurrent layers. We conduct extensive evaluations on three representative visual sequence learning tasks: sequential face alignment, dynamic hand gesture recognition, and action recognition. Our experiments reveal that PreRNN consistently outperforms the traditional RNNs and achieves state-of-the-art results on the three applications, suggesting that PreRNN is more suitable for visual sequence learning.
@cite_16: 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.
As one of the primary research directions in action recognition, action classification has drawn far more attention than action detection. Driven by the success of deep learning in image classification @cite_4 , many studies have explored to use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for video classification @cite_22 @cite_2 . In addition to applying the 2D convolutions to individual video frames, @cite_16 introduced the C3D model to simultaneously learn spatial and temporal features using the 3D convolutions with a buffer of video frames. @cite_40 studied various 3D convolutional networks for video understanding tasks to be more accurate and efficient. @cite_30 proposed an effective network architecture for spatio-temporal fusion of video snippets and studied different ways of fusing appearance and motion information. PreRNN was proposed in @cite_47 to transform convolutional networks to recurrent networks for various video understanding tasks including action classification.