Action recognition is a fundamental problem in computer vision with a lot of potential applications such as video surveillance, human computer interaction, and robot learning. Given pre-segmented videos, the task is to recognize actions happening within videos. Historically, hand crafted video features were used to address the task of action recognition. With the success of Deep ConvNets as an image analysis method, a lot of extensions of standard ConvNets were purposed to process variable length video data. In this work, we propose a novel recurrent ConvNet architecture called recurrent residual networks to address the task of action recognition. The approach extends ResNet, a state of the art model for image classification. While the original formulation of ResNet aims at learning spatial residuals in its layers, we extend the approach by introducing recurrent connections that allow to learn a spatio-temporal residual. In contrast to fully recurrent networks, our temporal connections only allow a limited range of preceding frames to contribute to the output for the current frame, enabling efficient training and inference as well as limiting the temporal context to a reasonable local range around each frame. On a large-scale action recognition dataset, we show that our model improves over both, the standard ResNet architecture and a ResNet extended by a fully recurrent layer.
@cite_18: This paper presents a novel framework to combine multiple layers and modalities of deep neural networks for video classification. We first propose a multilayer strategy to simultaneously capture a variety of levels of abstraction and invariance in a network, where the convolutional and fully connected layers are effectively represented by our proposed feature aggregation methods. We further introduce a multimodal scheme that includes four highly complementary modalities to extract diverse static and dynamic cues at multiple temporal scales. In particular, for modeling the long-term temporal information, we propose a new structure, FC-RNN, to effectively transform pre-trained fully connected layers into recurrent layers. A robust boosting model is then introduced to optimize the fusion of multiple layers and modalities in a unified way. In the extensive experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art results on two public benchmark datasets: UCF101 and HMDB51.
@cite_10: 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.
Deep recurrent CNN architectures are also explored to model dependencies across the frames. In @cite_10 , convolutional features are fed into an LSTM network to model temporal dependencies. @cite_18 considered four networks to address action recognition in videos. The first network is similar to spatial network in the two stream architecture. The second network is a CNN with one recurrent layer, it expects a single optical flow image and in recurrent layer, optical flows over a range of frames are combined. In the third network, they feed a stack of consecutive frames, the network is also equipped with a recurrent layer to capture the long term dependencies. Similarly, the fourth network expects a stack of optical flow fields as input. However, the network is equipped with a fully connected recurrent layer. Finally, boosting is used to combine the output of all four networks.