We address temporal action localization in untrimmed long videos. This is important because videos in real applications are usually unconstrained and contain multiple action instances plus video content of background scenes or other activities. To address this challenging issue, we exploit the effectiveness of deep networks in temporal action localization via three segment-based 3D ConvNets: (1) a proposal network identifies candidate segments in a long video that may contain actions; (2) a classification network learns one-vs-all action classification model to serve as initialization for the localization network; and (3) a localization network fine-tunes on the learned classification network to localize each action instance. We propose a novel loss function for the localization network to explicitly consider temporal overlap and therefore achieve high temporal localization accuracy. Only the proposal network and the localization network are used during prediction. On two large-scale benchmarks, our approach achieves significantly superior performances compared with other state-of-the-art systems: mAP increases from 1.7% to 7.4% on MEXaction2 and increases from 15.0% to 19.0% on THUMOS 2014, when the overlap threshold for evaluation is set to 0.5.
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）
Learning to localize actions in long, cluttered, and untrimmed videos is a hard task, that in the literature has typically been addressed assuming the availability of large amounts of annotated training samples for each class -- either in a fully-supervised setting, where action boundaries are known, or in a weakly-supervised setting, where only class labels are known for each video. In this paper, we go a step further and show that it is possible to learn to localize actions in untrimmed videos when a) only one/few trimmed examples of the target action are available at test time, and b) when …
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) aims to detect the action segments with only video-level action labels in training. The key challenge is how to distinguish the action of interest segments from the background, which is unlabelled even on the video-level. While previous works treat the background as "curses", we consider it as "blessings". Specifically, we first use causal analysis to point out that the common localization errors are due to the unobserved confounder that resides ubiquitously in visual recognition. Then, we propose a Temporal Smoothing PCA-based (TS-PCA) dec…
AdapNet: Adaptability Decomposing Encoder-Decoder Network for Weakly Supervised Action Recognition and Localization
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；College of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东）信息与控制工程学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
With the knowledge of action moments (i.e., trimmed video clips that each contains an action instance), humans could routinely localize an action temporally in an untrimmed video. Nevertheless, most practical methods still require all training videos to be labeled with temporal annotations (action category and temporal boundary) and develop the models in a fully-supervised manner, despite expensive labeling efforts and inapplicable to new categories. In this paper, we introduce a new design of transfer learning type to learn action localization for a large set of action categories, but only on…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to 2021 HACS Temporal Action Localization Challenge on both Supervised Learning Track and Weakly-Supervised Learning Track. Temporal Action Localization (TAL) requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. However, Weakly-Supervised TAL indicates locating the action instances using only video-level class labels. In this paper, to train a supervised temporal action localizer, we adopt Temporal Context Ag…
Learning Transferable Self-attentive Representations for Action Recognition in Untrimmed Videos with Weak Supervision
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Youedata Co., Ltd.（优数数据有限公司）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to recognize and localize action segments in untrimmed videos given only video-level action labels for training. Without the boundary information of action segments, existing methods mostly rely on multiple instance learning (MIL), where the predictions of unlabeled instances (i.e., video snippets) are supervised by classifying labeled bags (i.e., untrimmed videos). However, this formulation typically treats snippets in a video as independent instances, ignoring the underlying temporal structures within and across action segments. To address …
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, the Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学深圳大数据研究院）；DarkMatter AI
Temporal grounding of natural language in untrimmed videos is a fundamental yet challenging multimedia task facilitating cross-media visual content retrieval. We focus on the weakly supervised setting of this task that merely accesses to coarse video-level language description annotation without temporal boundary, which is more consistent with reality as such weak labels are more readily available in practice. In this paper, we propose a \emph{Boundary Adaptive Refinement} (BAR) framework that resorts to reinforcement learning (RL) to guide the process of progressively refining the temporal bo…
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
This paper strives to localize the temporal extent of an action in a long untrimmed video. Where existing work leverages many examples with their start, their ending, and/or the class of the action during training time, we propose few-shot common action localization. The start and end of an action in a long untrimmed video is determined based on just a hand-full of trimmed video examples containing the same action, without knowing their common class label. To address this task, we introduce a new 3D convolutional network architecture able to align representations from the support videos with t…
Detecting actions in videos have been widely applied in on-device applications. Practical on-device videos are always untrimmed with both action and background. It is desirable for a model to both recognize the class of action and localize the temporal position where the action happens. Such a task is called temporal action location (TAL), which is always trained on the cloud where multiple untrimmed videos are collected and labeled. It is desirable for a TAL model to continuously and locally learn from new data, which can directly improve the action detection precision while protecting custom…
We propose a Temporal Voting Network (TVNet) for action localization in untrimmed videos. This incorporates a novel Voting Evidence Module to locate temporal boundaries, more accurately, where temporal contextual evidence is accumulated to predict frame-level probabilities of start and end action boundaries. Our action-independent evidence module is incorporated within a pipeline to calculate confidence scores and action classes. We achieve an average mAP of 34.6% on ActivityNet-1.3, particularly outperforming previous methods with the highest IoU of 0.95. TVNet also achieves mAP of 56.0% when…
Existing temporal action localization (TAL) works rely on a large number of training videos with exhaustive segment-level annotation, preventing them from scaling to new classes. As a solution to this problem, few-shot TAL (FS-TAL) aims to adapt a model to a new class represented by as few as a single video. Exiting FS-TAL methods assume trimmed training videos for new classes. However, this setting is not only unnatural actions are typically captured in untrimmed videos, but also ignores background video segments containing vital contextual cues for foreground action segmentation. In this wor…
Temporal action localization (TAL) aims to detect the boundary and identify the class of each action instance in a long untrimmed video. Current approaches treat video frames homogeneously, and tend to give background and key objects excessive attention. This limits their sensitivity to localize action boundaries. To this end, we propose a prior-enhanced temporal action localization method (PETAL), which only takes in RGB input and incorporates action subjects as priors. This proposal leverages action subjects' information with a plug-and-play subject-aware spatial attention module (SA-SAM) to…
This paper introduces the task of few-shot common action localization in time and space. Given a few trimmed support videos containing the same but unknown action, we strive for spatio-temporal localization of that action in a long untrimmed query video. We do not require any class labels, interval bounds, or bounding boxes. To address this challenging task, we introduce a novel few-shot transformer architecture with a dedicated encoder-decoder structure optimized for joint commonality learning and localization prediction, without the need for proposals. Experiments on our reorganizations of t…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Due to the large memory footprint of untrimmed videos, current state-of-the-art video localization methods operate atop precomputed video clip features. These features are extracted from video encoders typically trained for trimmed action classification tasks, making such features not necessarily suitable for temporal localization. In this work, we propose a novel supervised pretraining paradigm for clip features that not only trains to classify activities but also considers background clips and global video information to improve temporal sensitivity. Extensive experiments show that using fea…
This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2020 Task 1 (\textbf{temporal action localization/detection}). Temporal action localization requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. In this paper, we decouple the temporal action localization task into two stages (i.e. proposal generation and classification) and enrich the proposal diversity through exhaustively exploring the influences of multiple components from differe…
Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学（KAUST））
Video action detectors are usually trained using datasets with fully-supervised temporal annotations. Building such datasets is an expensive task. To alleviate this problem, recent methods have tried to leverage weak labeling, where videos are untrimmed and only a video-level label is available. In this paper, we propose RefineLoc, a novel weakly-supervised temporal action localization method. RefineLoc uses an iterative refinement approach by estimating and training on snippet-level pseudo ground truth at every iteration. We show the benefit of this iterative approach and present an extensive…
Human Action Localization with Sparse Spatial Supervision
Xerox Research Centre Europe（施乐欧洲研究中心）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
我们介绍了一种方法，用于时空人体动作定位使用稀疏空间监督。我们的方法利用了当今可用的大量带注释的人类，并通过将最先进的人体检测器与检测跟踪方法相结合来提取人体管道。考虑到这些高质量的人体管和时间监督，我们选择具有非常稀疏的空间监督的阳性管和阴性管，即，每个实例仅一个空间注释帧。选定的管使我们能够有效地学习基于密集轨迹或CNN的时空动作检测器。我们在现有的动作本地化基准：UCF-Sports，J-HMDB和UCF-101上进行实验。我们的结果表明，尽管使用稀疏空间监督，我们的方法与使用完全监督的方法表现相当，即，每帧一个限界框注释。为了进一步验证我们的方法，我们引入了DALY（Daily Action Localization in YouTube），这是一个在空间和时间上进行真实动作定位的数据集。它包含31小时视频（330万帧）中10个动作的3.6k实例的高质量时间和空间注释。它比现有的数据集大一个数量级，具有更多样的外观和较长的未修剪视频。
TURN TAP: Temporal Unit Regression Network for Temporal Action Proposals
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
时间动作建议（TAP）生成是一个重要的问题，因为从未修剪的视频中快速准确地提取语义重要（例如人类动作）片段是大规模视频分析的重要步骤。提出了一种新的时间单位回归网络模型（TURN）。TURN有两个突出的方面：（1）TURN联合预测动作建议，并通过时间坐标回归细化时间边界;（2）通过单元特征重用实现快速计算：将长的未修剪视频分解为视频单元，这些单元被重用为时间建议的基本构建块。TURN在THUMOS-14和ActivityNet数据集上的平均召回率（AR）下的表现远远优于最先进的方法，并在TITAN X GPU上以超过880帧每秒（FPS）的速度运行。我们进一步应用TURN作为现有时间动作本地化管道的建议生成阶段，它在THUMOS-14和ActivityNet上的性能优于最先进的性能。
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WS-TAL) task aims to recognize and localize temporal starts and ends of action instances in an untrimmed video with only video-level label supervision. Due to lack of negative samples of background category, it is difficult for the network to separate foreground and background, resulting in poor detection performance. In this report, we present our 2021 HACS Challenge - Weakly-supervised Learning Track solution that based on BaSNet to address above problem. Specifically, we first adopt pre-trained CSN, Slowfast, TDN, and ViViT as feature extracto…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Weakly supervised temporal action localization aims to detect and localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels during training. However, without frame-level annotations, it is challenging to achieve localization completeness and relieve background interference. In this paper, we present an Action Unit Memory Network (AUMN) for weakly supervised temporal action localization, which can mitigate the above two challenges by learning an action unit memory bank. In the proposed AUMN, two attention modules are designed to update the memory bank adaptively and learn action units s…
Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
The main challenge of Temporal Action Localization is to retrieve subtle human actions from various co-occurring ingredients, e.g., context and background, in an untrimmed video. While prior approaches have achieved substantial progress through devising advanced action detectors, they still suffer from these co-occurring ingredients which often dominate the actual action content in videos. In this paper, we explore two orthogonal but complementary aspects of a video snippet, i.e., the action features and the co-occurrence features. Especially, we develop a novel auxiliary task by decoupling th…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Temporal action localization aims to predict the boundary and category of each action instance in untrimmed long videos. Most of previous methods based on anchors or proposals neglect the global-local context interaction in entire video sequences. Besides, their multi-stage designs cannot generate action boundaries and categories straightforwardly. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a end-to-end model, called Adaptive Perception transformer (AdaPerFormer for short). Specifically, AdaPerFormer explores a dual-branch attention mechanism. One branch takes care of the global percepti…
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Temporal action localization is an important and challenging task that aims to locate temporal regions in real-world untrimmed videos where actions occur and recognize their classes. It is widely acknowledged that video context is a critical cue for video understanding, and exploiting the context has become an important strategy to boost localization performance. However, previous state-of-the-art methods focus more on exploring semantic context which captures the feature similarity among frames or proposals, and neglect positional context which is vital for temporal localization. In this pape…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；HERE Technologies（HERE科技公司）；State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Wormpex AI Research（沃姆派克斯人工智能研究院）
Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (W-TAL) aims to classify and localize all action instances in an untrimmed video under only video-level supervision. However, without frame-level annotations, it is challenging for W-TAL methods to identify false positive action proposals and generate action proposals with precise temporal boundaries. In this paper, we present a Two-Stream Consensus Network (TSCN) to simultaneously address these challenges. The proposed TSCN features an iterative refinement training method, where a frame-level pseudo ground truth is iteratively updated, and used t…
Point-Level temporal action localization (PTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only one timestamp annotation for each action instance. Existing methods adopt the frame-level prediction paradigm to learn from the sparse single-frame labels. However, such a framework inevitably suffers from a large solution space. This paper attempts to explore the proposal-based prediction paradigm for point-level annotations, which has the advantage of more constrained solution space and consistent predictions among neighboring frames. The point-level annotations are first used as the keypoi…
In this paper, we consider the problem of temporal action localization under low-shot (zero-shot & few-shot) scenario, with the goal of detecting and classifying the action instances from arbitrary categories within some untrimmed videos, even not seen at training time. We adopt a Transformer-based two-stage action localization architecture with class-agnostic action proposal, followed by open-vocabulary classification. We make the following contributions. First, to compensate image-text foundation models with temporal motions, we improve category-agnostic action proposal by explicitly alignin…
Real-world videos contain many complex actions with inherent relationships between action classes. In this work, we propose an attention-based architecture that models these action relationships for the task of temporal action localization in untrimmed videos. As opposed to previous works that leverage video-level co-occurrence of actions, we distinguish the relationships between actions that occur at the same time-step and actions that occur at different time-steps (i.e. those which precede or follow each other). We define these distinct relationships as action dependencies. We propose to imp…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Most modern approaches in temporal action localization divide this problem into two parts: (i) short-term feature extraction and (ii) long-range temporal boundary localization. Due to the high GPU memory cost caused by processing long untrimmed videos, many methods sacrifice the representational power of the short-term feature extractor by either freezing the backbone or using a small spatial video resolution. This issue becomes even worse with the recent video transformer models, many of which have quadratic memory complexity. To address these issues, we propose TALLFormer, a memory-efficient…
University of Liège（列日大学）；EVS Broadcast Equipment（EVS广播设备公司）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Soccer broadcast video understanding has been drawing a lot of attention in recent years within data scientists and industrial companies. This is mainly due to the lucrative potential unlocked by effective deep learning techniques developed in the field of computer vision. In this work, we focus on the topic of camera calibration and on its current limitations for the scientific community. More precisely, we tackle the absence of a large-scale calibration dataset and of a public calibration network trained on such a dataset. Specifically, we distill a powerful commercial calibration tool in a …
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering（电气与电子工程学院）
Online Temporal Action Localization (On-TAL) aims to immediately provide action instances from untrimmed streaming videos. The model is not allowed to utilize future frames and any processing techniques to modify past predictions, making On-TAL much more challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework, termed SimOn, that learns to predict action instances using the popular Transformer architecture in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, the model takes the current frame feature as a query and a set of past context information as keys and values of the Transformer. Differ…
With video-level labels, weakly supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) applies a localization-by-classification paradigm to detect and classify the action in untrimmed videos. Due to the characteristic of classification, class-specific background snippets are inevitably mis-activated to improve the discriminability of the classifier in WTAL. To alleviate the disturbance of background, existing methods try to enlarge the discrepancy between action and background through modeling background snippets with pseudo-snippet-level annotations, which largely rely on artificial hypotheticals. Di…
Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to predict both action category and temporal boundary of action instances in untrimmed videos, i.e., start and end time. Fully-supervised solutions are usually adopted in most existing works, and proven to be effective. One of the practical bottlenecks in these solutions is the large amount of labeled training data required. To reduce expensive human label cost, this paper focuses on a rarely investigated yet practical task named semi-supervised TAL and proposes an effective active learning method, named AL-STAL. We leverage four steps for actively selec…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Temporal action localization (TAL) is an important and challenging problem in video understanding. However, most existing TAL benchmarks are built upon the coarse granularity of action classes, which exhibits two major limitations in this task. First, coarse-level actions can make the localization models overfit in high-level context information, and ignore the atomic action details in the video. Second, the coarse action classes often lead to the ambiguous annotations of temporal boundaries, which are inappropriate for temporal action localization. To tackle these problems, we develop a novel…
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to localize action instances in untrimmed videos with only video-level supervision. We witness that different actions record common phases, e.g., the run-up in the HighJump and LongJump. These different actions are defined as conjoint actions, whose rest parts are definite phases, e.g., leaping over the bar in a HighJump. Compared with the common phases, the definite phases are more easily localized in existing researches. Most of them formulate this task as a Multiple Instance Learning paradigm, in which the common phases are tended to be co…
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models follow the "localization by classification" procedure: locate temporal regions contributing most to the video-level classification. Generally, they process each snippet (or frame) individually and thus overlook the fruitful temporal context relation. Here arises the single snippet cheating issue: "hard" snippets are too vague to be classified. In this paper, we argue that learning by comparing helps identify these hard snippets and we propose t…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Weakly supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only weak supervision information (e.g. video-level labels). Most existing models handle all input videos with a fixed temporal scale. However, such models are not sensitive to actions whose pace of the movements is different from the ``normal" speed, especially slow-motion action instances, which complete the movements with a much slower speed than their counterparts with a normal speed. Here arises the slow-motion blurred issue: It is hard to explore salient slow-motion information from vi…
