Spatio-temporal action detection in videos is typically addressed in a fully-supervised setup with manual annotation of training videos required at every frame. Since such annotation is extremely tedious and prohibits scalability, there is a clear need to minimize the amount of manual supervision. In this work we propose a unifying framework that can handle and combine varying types of less-demanding weak supervision. Our model is based on discriminative clustering and integrates different types of supervision as constraints on the optimization. We investigate applications of such a model to training setups with alternative supervisory signals ranging from video-level class labels over temporal points or sparse action bounding boxes to the full per-frame annotation of action bounding boxes. Experiments on the challenging UCF101-24 and DALY datasets demonstrate competitive performance of our method at a fraction of supervision used by previous methods. The flexibility of our model enables joint learning from data with different levels of annotation. Experimental results demonstrate a significant gain by adding a few fully supervised examples to otherwise weakly labeled videos.
@cite_35: Current state-of-the-art approaches for spatio-temporal action localization rely on detections at the frame level that are then linked or tracked across time. In this paper, we leverage the temporal continuity of videos instead of operating at the frame level. We propose the ACtion Tubelet detector (ACT-detector) that takes as input a sequence of frames and outputs tubelets, i.e., sequences of bounding boxes with associated scores. The same way state-of-the-art object detectors rely on anchor boxes, our ACT-detector is based on anchor cuboids. We build upon the SSD framework. Convolutional features are extracted for each frame, while scores and regressions are based on the temporal stacking of these features, thus exploiting information from a sequence. Our experimental results show that leveraging sequences of frames significantly improves detection performance over using individual frames. The gain of our tubelet detector can be explained by both more accurate scores and more precise localization. Our ACT-detector outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for frame-mAP and video-mAP on the J-HMDB and UCF-101 datasets, in particular at high overlap thresholds.
@cite_47: 
@cite_31: We present a deep-learning framework for real-time multiple spatio-temporal (S T) action localisation, classification and early prediction. Current state-of-the-art approaches work offline and are too slow to be useful in real- world settings. To overcome their limitations we introduce two major developments. Firstly, we adopt real-time SSD (Single Shot MultiBox Detector) convolutional neural networks to regress and classify detection boxes in each video frame potentially containing an action of interest. Secondly, we design an original and efficient online algorithm to incrementally construct and label action tubes' from the SSD frame level detections. As a result, our system is not only capable of performing S T detection in real time, but can also perform early action prediction in an online fashion. We achieve new state-of-the-art results in both S T action localisation and early action prediction on the challenging UCF101-24 and J-HMDB-21 benchmarks, even when compared to the top offline competitors. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first real-time (up to 40fps) system able to perform online S T action localisation and early action prediction on the untrimmed videos of UCF101-24.
@cite_14: We propose an effective approach for spatio-temporal action localization in realistic videos. The approach first detects proposals at the frame-level and scores them with a combination of static and motion CNN features. It then tracks high-scoring proposals throughout the video using a tracking-by-detection approach. Our tracker relies simultaneously on instance-level and class-level detectors. The tracks are scored using a spatio-temporal motion histogram, a descriptor at the track level, in combination with the CNN features. Finally, we perform temporal localization of the action using a sliding-window approach at the track level. We present experimental results for spatio-temporal localization on the UCF-Sports, J-HMDB and UCF-101 action localization datasets, where our approach outperforms the state of the art with a margin of 15 , 7 and 12 respectively in mAP.
@cite_18: 
@cite_7: In this work, we propose an approach to the spatiotemporal localisation (detection) and classification of multiple concurrent actions within temporally untrimmed videos. Our framework is composed of three stages. In stage 1, appearance and motion detection networks are employed to localise and score actions from colour images and optical flow. In stage 2, the appearance network detections are boosted by combining them with the motion detection scores, in proportion to their respective spatial overlap. In stage 3, sequences of detection boxes most likely to be associated with a single action instance, called action tubes, are constructed by solving two energy maximisation problems via dynamic programming. While in the first pass, action paths spanning the whole video are built by linking detection boxes over time using their class-specific scores and their spatial overlap, in the second pass, temporal trimming is performed by ensuring label consistency for all constituting detection boxes. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on the challenging UCF101, J-HMDB-21 and LIRIS-HARL datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art results across the board and significantly increasing detection speed at test time. We achieve a huge leap forward in action detection performance and report a 20 and 11 gain in mAP (mean average precision) on UCF-101 and J-HMDB-21 datasets respectively when compared to the state-of-the-art.
@cite_8: We propose a unified approach for bottom-up hierarchical image segmentation and object candidate generation for recognition, called Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping (MCG). For this purpose, we first develop a fast normalized cuts algorithm. We then propose a high-performance hierarchical segmenter that makes effective use of multiscale information. Finally, we propose a grouping strategy that combines our multiscale regions into highly-accurate object candidates by exploring efficiently their combinatorial space. We conduct extensive experiments on both the BSDS500 and on the PASCAL 2012 segmentation datasets, showing that MCG produces state-of-the-art contours, hierarchical regions and object candidates.
@cite_41: 
@cite_37: 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_29: Dominant approaches to action detection can only provide sub-optimal solutions to the problem, as they rely on seeking frame-level detections, to later compose them into action tubes in a post-processing step. With this paper we radically depart from current practice, and take a first step towards the design and implementation of a deep network architecture able to classify and regress whole video subsets, so providing a truly optimal solution of the action detection problem. In this work, in particular, we propose a novel deep net framework able to regress and classify 3D region proposals spanning two consecutive video frames, whose core is an evolution of classical region proposal networks (RPNs). As such, our 3D-RPN net is able to effectively encode the temporal aspect of actions by purely exploiting appearance, as opposed to methods which heavily rely on expensive flow maps computed in a parallel stream. The proposed model is end-to-end trainable and can be jointly optimised for action localisation and classification using a single step of optimisation. At test time the network predicts 'micro-tubes' spanning two frames, which are linked up into complete action tubes via a new algorithm which exploits the temporal encoding learned by the network and cuts computation time by 50 . Promising results on the J-HMDB-21 and UCF-101 action detection datasets show that our model does indeed outperform the state-of-the-art when relying purely on appearance.
@cite_21: General human action recognition requires understanding of various visual cues. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that computes and integrates the most important visual cues for action recognition: pose, motion, and the raw images. For the integration, we introduce a Markov chain model which adds cues successively. The resulting approach is efficient and applicable to action classification as well as to spatial and temporal action localization. The two contributions clearly improve the performance over respective baselines. The overall approach achieves state-of-the-art action classification performance on HMDB51, J-HMDB and NTU RGB+D datasets. Moreover, it yields state-of-the-art spatio-temporal action localization results on UCF101 and J-HMDB.
@cite_0: We propose a multi-region two-stream R-CNN model for action detection in realistic videos. We start from frame-level action detection based on faster R-CNN [1], and make three contributions: (1) we show that a motion region proposal network generates high-quality proposals , which are complementary to those of an appearance region proposal network; (2) we show that stacking optical flow over several frames significantly improves frame-level action detection; and (3) we embed a multi-region scheme in the faster R-CNN model, which adds complementary information on body parts. We then link frame-level detections with the Viterbi algorithm, and temporally localize an action with the maximum subarray method. Experimental results on the UCF-Sports, J-HMDB and UCF101 action detection datasets show that our approach outperforms the state of the art with a significant margin in both frame-mAP and video-mAP.
@cite_43: This paper studies the use of volumetric features as an alternative to popular local descriptor approaches for event detection in video sequences. Motivated by the recent success of similar ideas in object detection on static images, we generalize the notion of 2D box features to 3D spatio-temporal volumetric features. This general framework enables us to do real-time video analysis. We construct a realtime event detector for each action of interest by learning a cascade of filters based on volumetric features that efficiently scans video sequences in space and time. This event detector recognizes actions that are traditionally problematic for interest point methods - such as smooth motions where insufficient space-time interest points are available. Our experiments demonstrate that the technique accurately detects actions on real-world sequences and is robust to changes in viewpoint, scale and action speed. We also adapt our technique to the related task of human action classification and confirm that it achieves performance comparable to a current interest point based human activity recognizer on a standard database of human activities.
@cite_19: 
@cite_46: We address recognition and localization of human actions in realistic scenarios. In contrast to the previous work studying human actions in controlled settings, here we train and test algorithms on real movies with substantial variation of actions in terms of subject appearance, motion, surrounding scenes, viewing angles and spatio-temporal extents. We introduce a new annotated human action dataset and use it to evaluate several existing methods. We in particular focus on boosted space-time window classifiers and introduce "keyframe priming" that combines discriminative models of human motion and shape within an action. Keyframe priming is shown to significantly improve the performance of action detection. We present detection results for the action class "drinking" evaluated on two episodes of the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes".
@cite_16: 
@cite_17: 
Spatio-temporal action localization consists in finding action instances in a video volume, i.e. both in space and time. Initial attempts @cite_43 @cite_46 scanned the video clip with a 3D sliding window detector on top of volumetric features. Next, @cite_47 @cite_16 adapted the idea of object proposals @cite_8 @cite_19 to video action proposals. Currently, the dominant strategy @cite_17 @cite_0 @cite_7 @cite_31 @cite_14 is to obtain per-frame action detections and then to link them into continuous spatio-temporal tracks. The most recent methods @cite_18 @cite_41 @cite_35 @cite_29 @cite_21 operate on multiple frames and leverage temporal information to determine actions. Examples include stacking features from several frames @cite_35 and applying the I3D features @cite_37 to spatio-temporal volumes @cite_18 . These methods are fully supervised and necessitate a large quantity of annotations.