Video-based action recognition has recently attracted much attention in the field of computer vision. To solve more complex recognition tasks, it has become necessary to distinguish different levels of interclass variations. Inspired by a common flowchart based on the human decision-making process that first narrows down the probable classes and then applies a "rethinking" process for finer-level recognition, we propose an effective universal-to-specific (U2S) framework for complex action recognition. The U2S framework is composed of three subnetworks: a universal network, a category-specific network, and a mask network. The universal network first learns universal feature representations. The mask network then generates attention masks for confusing classes through category regularization based on the output of the universal network. The mask is further used to guide the category-specific network for class-specific feature representations. The entire framework is optimized in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, e.g., the Something-Something, UCF101, and HMDB51 datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the U2S framework; i.e., U2S can focus on discriminative spatiotemporal regions for confusing categories. We further visualize the relationship between different classes, showing that U2S indeed improves the discriminability of learned features. Moreover, the proposed U2S model is a general framework and may adopt any base recognition network.
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology（计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Action recognition is a vital task in computer vision, and many methods are developed to push it to the limit. However, current action recognition models have huge computational costs, which cannot be deployed to real-world tasks on mobile devices. In this paper, we first illustrate the setting of real-time action recognition, which is different from current action recognition inference settings. Under the new inference setting, we investigate state-of-the-art action recognition models on the Kinetics dataset empirically. Our results show that designing efficient real-time action recognition m…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Human action recognition has drawn a lot of attention in the recent years due to the research and application significance. Most existing works on action recognition focus on learning effective spatial-temporal features from videos, but neglect the strong causal relationship among the precondition, action and effect. Such relationships are also crucial to the accuracy of action recognition. In this paper, we propose to model the causal relationships based on the precondition and effect to improve the performance of action recognition. Specifically, a Cycle-Reasoning model is proposed to captur…
This notebook paper presents an overview and comparative analysis of our systems designed for the following three tasks in ActivityNet Challenge 2019: trimmed action recognition, dense-captioning events in videos, and spatio-temporal action localization.
Facebook（脸书）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Most of the top performing action recognition methods use optical flow as a "black box" input. Here we take a deeper look at the combination of flow and action recognition, and investigate why optical flow is helpful, what makes a flow method good for action recognition, and how we can make it better. In particular, we investigate the impact of different flow algorithms and input transformations to better understand how these affect a state-of-the-art action recognition method. Furthermore, we fine tune two neural-network flow methods end-to-end on the most widely used action recognition datas…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Comcast Labs, DC（康卡斯特实验室（华盛顿特区））
Even with the recent advances in convolutional neural networks (CNN) in various visual recognition tasks, the state-of-the-art action recognition system still relies on hand crafted motion feature such as optical flow to achieve the best performance. We propose a multitask learning model ActionFlowNet to train a single stream network directly from raw pixels to jointly estimate optical flow while recognizing actions with convolutional neural networks, capturing both appearance and motion in a single model. We additionally provide insights to how the quality of the learned optical flow affects …
The literature review presented below on Action Recognition in the wild is the in-depth study of Research Papers. Action Recognition problem in the untrimmed videos is a challenging task and most of the papers have tackled this problem using hand-crafted features with shallow learning techniques and sophisticated end-to-end deep learning techniques.
In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method for action recognition using instance segmentation. Although many data augmentation methods have been proposed for image recognition, few of them are tailored for action recognition. Our proposed method, ObjectMix, extracts each object region from two videos using instance segmentation and combines them to create new videos. Experiments on two action recognition datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show its superiority over VideoMix, a prior work.
Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等理工学院）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Bitbrain Technologies（Bitbrain技术公司）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
One-shot action recognition aims to recognize new action categories from a single reference example, typically referred to as the anchor example. This work presents a novel approach for one-shot action recognition in the wild that computes motion representations robust to variable kinematic conditions. One-shot action recognition is then performed by evaluating anchor and target motion representations. We also develop a set of complementary steps that boost the action recognition performance in the most challenging scenarios. Our approach is evaluated on the public NTU-120 one-shot action reco…
Existing action recognition methods mainly focus on joint and bone information in human body skeleton data due to its robustness to complex backgrounds and dynamic characteristics of the environments. In this paper, we combine body skeleton data with spatial and motion features from face and two hands, and present "Deep Action Stamps (DeepActs)", a novel data representation to encode actions from video sequences. We also present "DeepActsNet", a deep learning based ensemble model which learns convolutional and structural features from Deep Action Stamps for highly accurate action recognition. …
Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61/CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61）；University of Western Australia (UWA)（西澳大利亚大学）
Video-based human action recognition is currently one of the most active research areas in computer vision. Various research studies indicate that the performance of action recognition is highly dependent on the type of features being extracted and how the actions are represented. Since the release of the Kinect camera, a large number of Kinect-based human action recognition techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, there still does not exist a thorough comparison of these Kinect-based techniques under the grouping of feature types, such as handcrafted versus deep learning feat…
This paper studies how to introduce viewpoint-invariant feature representations that can help action recognition and detection. Although we have witnessed great progress of action recognition in the past decade, it remains challenging yet interesting how to efficiently model the geometric variations in large scale datasets. This paper proposes a novel Spatial-Temporal Alignment Network (STAN) that aims to learn geometric invariant representations for action recognition and action detection. The STAN model is very light-weighted and generic, which could be plugged into existing action recogniti…
China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学）；University of Wollongong（卧龙岗大学）
Different from traditional action recognition based on video segments, online action recognition aims to recognize actions from unsegmented streams of data in a continuous manner. One way for online recognition is based on the evidence accumulation over time to make predictions from stream videos. This paper presents a fast yet effective method to recognize actions from stream of noisy skeleton data, and a novel weighted covariance descriptor is adopted to accumulate evidence. In particular, a fast incremental updating method for the weighted covariance descriptor is developed for accumulation…
Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
In this report, we present the technical details of our submission to the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) Challenge for Action Recognition 2022. This task aims to adapt an action recognition model trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. To achieve this goal, we propose an action-aware domain adaptation framework that leverages the prior knowledge induced from the action recognition task during the adaptation. Specifically, we disentangle the source features into action-relevant features and action-irrelevant features using the learned action cla…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学）；Horizon Robotics, Inc.（地平线机器人公司）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
Existing methods in video action recognition mostly do not distinguish human body from the environment and easily overfit the scenes and objects. In this work, we present a conceptually simple, general and high-performance framework for action recognition in trimmed videos, aiming at person-centric modeling. The method, called Action Machine, takes as inputs the videos cropped by person bounding boxes. It extends the Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) by adding a branch for human pose estimation and a 2D CNN for pose-based action recognition, being fast to train and test. Action Machine can benefit fro…
The Chinese University of HongKong（香港中文大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
We present PYSKL: an open-source toolbox for skeleton-based action recognition based on PyTorch. The toolbox supports a wide variety of skeleton action recognition algorithms, including approaches based on GCN and CNN. In contrast to existing open-source skeleton action recognition projects that include only one or two algorithms, PYSKL implements six different algorithms under a unified framework with both the latest and original good practices to ease the comparison of efficacy and efficiency. We also provide an original GCN-based skeleton action recognition model named ST-GCN++, which achie…
In this paper we consider the task of recognizing human actions in realistic video where human actions are dominated by irrelevant factors. We first study the benefits of removing non-action video segments, which are the ones that do not portray any human action. We then learn a non-action classifier and use it to down-weight irrelevant video segments. The non-action classifier is trained using ActionThread, a dataset with shot-level annotation for the occurrence or absence of a human action. The non-action classifier can be used to identify non-action shots with high precision and subsequentl…
In computer vision, action recognition refers to the act of classifying an action that is present in a given video and action detection involves locating actions of interest in space and/or time. Videos, which contain photometric information (e.g. RGB, intensity values) in a lattice structure, contain information that can assist in identifying the action that has been imaged. The process of action recognition and detection often begins with extracting useful features and encoding them to ensure that the features are specific to serve the task of action recognition and detection. Encoded featur…
Human action recognition (HAR) in videos is a fundamental research topic in computer vision. It consists mainly in understanding actions performed by humans based on a sequence of visual observations. In recent years, HAR have witnessed significant progress, especially with the emergence of deep learning models. However, most of existing approaches for action recognition rely on information that is not always relevant for this task, and are limited in the way they fuse the temporal information. In this paper, we propose a novel method for human action recognition that encodes efficiently the m…
B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院B. Thomas Golisano计算与信息科学学院）；Department of ECE and College of CIS, Northeastern University（东北大学电气与计算机工程系及计算与信息科学学院）
Derived from rapid advances in computer vision and machine learning, video analysis tasks have been moving from inferring the present state to predicting the future state. Vision-based action recognition and prediction from videos are such tasks, where action recognition is to infer human actions (present state) based upon complete action executions, and action prediction to predict human actions (future state) based upon incomplete action executions. These two tasks have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as visual…
Human action recognition is a quite hugely investigated area where most remarkable action recognition networks usually use large-scale coarse-grained action datasets of daily human actions as inputs to state the superiority of their networks. We intend to recognize our small-scale fine-grained Tai Chi action dataset using neural networks and propose a transfer-learning method using NTU RGB+D dataset to pre-train our network. More specifically, the proposed method first uses a large-scale NTU RGB+D dataset to pre-train the Transformer-based network for action recognition to extract common featu…
Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Bitbrain Technologies（比特脑科技）
Hand action recognition is a special case of action recognition with applications in human-robot interaction, virtual reality or life-logging systems. Building action classifiers able to work for such heterogeneous action domains is very challenging. There are very subtle changes across different actions from a given application but also large variations across domains (e.g. virtual reality vs life-logging). This work introduces a novel skeleton-based hand motion representation model that tackles this problem. The framework we propose is agnostic to the application domain or camera recording v…
Event camera is an asynchronous, high frequency vision sensor with low power consumption, which is suitable for human action recognition task. It is vital to encode the spatial-temporal information of event data properly and use standard computer vision tool to learn from the data. In this work, we propose a timestamp image encoding 2D network, which takes the encoded spatial-temporal images of the event data as input and output the action label. Experiment results show that our method can achieve the same level of performance as those RGB-based benchmarks on real world action recognition, and…
CRCV University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学计算机视觉研究中心）
Human action recognition is an important problem in computer vision. It has a wide range of applications in surveillance, human-computer interaction, augmented reality, video indexing, and retrieval. The varying pattern of spatio-temporal appearance generated by human action is key for identifying the performed action. We have seen a lot of research exploring this dynamics of spatio-temporal appearance for learning a visual representation of human actions. However, most of the research in action recognition is focused on some common viewpoints, and these approaches do not perform well when the…
Video action recognition, which is topical in computer vision and video analysis, aims to allocate a short video clip to a pre-defined category such as brushing hair or climbing stairs. Recent works focus on action recognition with deep neural networks that achieve state-of-the-art results in need of high-performance platforms. Despite the fast development of mobile computing, video action recognition on mobile devices has not been fully discussed. In this paper, we focus on the novel mobile video action recognition task, where only the computational capabilities of mobile devices are accessib…
Despite the notable progress made in action recognition tasks, not much work has been done in action recognition specifically for human-robot interaction. In this paper, we deeply explore the characteristics of the action recognition task in interaction scenarios and propose an attention-oriented multi-level network framework to meet the need for real-time interaction. Specifically, a Pre-Attention network is employed to roughly focus on the interactor in the scene at low resolution firstly and then perform fine-grained pose estimation at high resolution. The other compact CNN receives the ext…
Human action recognition is a well-known computer vision and pattern recognition task of identifying which action a man is actually doing. Extracting the keypoint information of a single human with both spatial and temporal features of action sequences plays an essential role to accomplish the task.In this paper, we propose a human action system for Red-Green-Blue(RGB) input video with our own designed module. Based on the efficient Gated Recurrent Unit(GRU) for spatio-temporal feature extraction, we add another sampling module and normalization module to improve the performance of the model i…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Kauishou（快手）
Despite excellent progress has been made, the performance on action recognition still heavily relies on specific datasets, which are difficult to extend new action classes due to labor-intensive labeling. Moreover, the high diversity in Spatio-temporal appearance requires robust and representative action feature aggregation and attention. To address the above issues, we focus on atomic actions and propose a novel model for semi-supervised few-shot atomic action recognition. Our model features unsupervised and contrastive video embedding, loose action alignment, multi-head feature comparison, a…
The task of action recognition or action detection involves analyzing videos and determining what action or motion is being performed. The primary subject of these videos are predominantly humans performing some action. However, this requirement can be relaxed to generalize over other subjects such as animals or robots. The applications can range from anywhere between human-computer inter-action to automated video editing proposals. When we consider spatiotemporal action recognition, we deal with action localization. This task not only involves determining what action is being performed but al…
In this paper, we report on experiments with the use of local measures for depth motion for visual action recognition from MPEG encoded RGBD video sequences. We show that such measures can be combined with local space-time video descriptors for appearance to provide a computationally efficient method for recognition of actions. Fisher vectors are used for encoding and concatenating a depth descriptor with existing RGB local descriptors. We then employ a linear SVM for recognizing manipulation actions using such vectors. We evaluate the effectiveness of such measures by comparison to the state-…
Zhejiang University – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute, ZJUI（浙江大学伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳香槟校区联合学院（ZJUI））
Action recognition and pose estimation from videos are closely related to understand human motions, but more literature focuses on how to solve pose estimation tasks alone from action recognition. This research shows a faster and more flexible training method for VideoPose3D which is based on action recognition. This model is fed with the same type of action as the type that will be estimated, and different types of actions can be trained separately. Evidence has shown that, for common pose-estimation tasks, this model requires a relatively small amount of data to carry out similar results wit…
In this paper we propose a novel Temporal Attentive Relation Network (TARN) for the problems of few-shot and zero-shot action recognition. At the heart of our network is a meta-learning approach that learns to compare representations of variable temporal length, that is, either two videos of different length (in the case of few-shot action recognition) or a video and a semantic representation such as word vector (in the case of zero-shot action recognition). By contrast to other works in few-shot and zero-shot action recognition, we a) utilise attention mechanisms so as to perform temporal ali…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Current researches of action recognition mainly focus on single-view and multi-view recognition, which can hardly satisfies the requirements of human-robot interaction (HRI) applications to recognize actions from arbitrary views. The lack of datasets also sets up barriers. To provide data for arbitrary-view action recognition, we newly collect a large-scale RGB-D action dataset for arbitrary-view action analysis, including RGB videos, depth and skeleton sequences. The dataset includes action samples captured in 8 fixed viewpoints and varying-view sequences which covers the entire 360 degree vi…
In a real-world scenario, human actions are typically out of the distribution from training data, which requires a model to both recognize the known actions and reject the unknown. Different from image data, video actions are more challenging to be recognized in an open-set setting due to the uncertain temporal dynamics and static bias of human actions. In this paper, we propose a Deep Evidential Action Recognition (DEAR) method to recognize actions in an open testing set. Specifically, we formulate the action recognition problem from the evidential deep learning (EDL) perspective and propose …
The canonical approach to video action recognition dictates a neural model to do a classic and standard 1-of-N majority vote task. They are trained to predict a fixed set of predefined categories, limiting their transferable ability on new datasets with unseen concepts. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on action recognition by attaching importance to the semantic information of label texts rather than simply mapping them into numbers. Specifically, we model this task as a video-text matching problem within a multimodal learning framework, which strengthens the video representation w…
CAS Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-Spatial Information Processing and Application System（中国科学院地理空间信息处理与应用系统技术重点实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
We study the video super-resolution (SR) problem for facilitating video analytics tasks, e.g. action recognition, instead of for visual quality. The popular action recognition methods based on convolutional networks, exemplified by two-stream networks, are not directly applicable on video of low spatial resolution. This can be remedied by performing video SR prior to recognition, which motivates us to improve the SR procedure for recognition accuracy. Tailored for two-stream action recognition networks, we propose two video SR methods for the spatial and temporal streams respectively. On the o…
In video action recognition, transformers consistently reach state-of-the-art accuracy. However, many models are too heavyweight for the average researcher with limited hardware resources. In this work, we explore the limitations of video transformers for lightweight action recognition. We benchmark 13 video transformers and baselines across 3 large-scale datasets and 10 hardware devices. Our study is the first to evaluate the efficiency of action recognition models in depth across multiple devices and train a wide range of video transformers under the same conditions. We categorize current me…
Detection of fights is an important surveillance application in videos. Most existing methods use supervised binary action recognition. Since frame-level annotations are very hard to get for anomaly detection, weakly supervised learning using multiple instance learning is widely used. This paper explores the detection of fights in videos as one special type of anomaly detection and as binary action recognition. We use the UBI-Fight and NTU-CCTV-Fight datasets for most of the study since they have frame-level annotations. We find that the anomaly detection has similar or even better performance…
Australia Artificial Intelligence Institute（澳大利亚人工智能研究所）；School of Electrical and Data Engineering（电气与数据工程学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Existing 3D skeleton-based action recognition approaches reach impressive performance by encoding handcrafted action features to image format and decoding by CNNs. However, such methods are limited in two ways: a) the handcrafted action features are difficult to handle challenging actions, and b) they generally require complex CNN models to improve action recognition accuracy, which usually occur heavy computational burden. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel AFE-CNN, which devotes to enhance the features of 3D skeleton-based actions to adapt to challenging actions. We propose …
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
Action recognition is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. While current state-of-the-art models offer excellent recognition results, their computational expense limits their impact for many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called AR-Net (Adaptive Resolution Network), that selects on-the-fly the optimal resolution for each frame conditioned on the input for efficient action recognition in long untrimmed videos. Specifically, given a video frame, a policy network is used to decide what input resolution should be used for processing by the actio…
Is it possible to guess human action from dialogue alone? In this work we investigate the link between spoken words and actions in movies. We note that movie screenplays describe actions, as well as contain the speech of characters and hence can be used to learn this correlation with no additional supervision. We train a BERT-based Speech2Action classifier on over a thousand movie screenplays, to predict action labels from transcribed speech segments. We then apply this model to the speech segments of a large unlabelled movie corpus (188M speech segments from 288K movies). Using the prediction…
University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；FPT Software（FPT软件公司）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；University of Wollongong（伍伦贡大学）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）
Human action recognition has recently become one of the popular research topics in the computer vision community. Various 3D-CNN based methods have been presented to tackle both the spatial and temporal dimensions in the task of video action recognition with competitive results. However, these methods have suffered some fundamental limitations such as lack of robustness and generalization, e.g., how does the temporal ordering of video frames affect the recognition results? This work presents a novel end-to-end Transformer-based Directed Attention (DirecFormer) framework for robust action recog…
The ever-growing popularity of Kinect and inertial sensors has prompted intensive research efforts on human action recognition. Since human actions can be characterized by multiple feature representations extracted from Kinect and inertial sensors, multiview features must be encoded into a unified space optimal for human action recognition. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised feature fusion method termed Multiview Cauchy Estimator Feature Embedding (MCEFE) for human action recognition. By minimizing empirical risk, MCEFE integrates the encoded complementary information in multiple vie…
We benchmark contemporary action recognition models (TSN, TRN, and TSM) on the recently introduced EPIC-Kitchens dataset and release pretrained models on GitHub (https://github.com/epic-kitchens/action-models) for others to build upon. In contrast to popular action recognition datasets like Kinetics, Something-Something, UCF101, and HMDB51, EPIC-Kitchens is shot from an egocentric perspective and captures daily actions in-situ. In this report, we aim to understand how well these models can tackle the challenges present in this dataset, such as its long tail class distribution, unseen environme…
While many action recognition datasets consist of collections of brief, trimmed videos each containing a relevant action, videos in the real-world (e.g., on YouTube) exhibit very different properties: they are often several minutes long, where brief relevant clips are often interleaved with segments of extended duration containing little change. Applying densely an action recognition system to every temporal clip within such videos is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, as we show in our experiments, this results in suboptimal recognition accuracy as informative predictions from relevant cli…
Few-shot action recognition has attracted increasing attention due to the difficulty in acquiring the properly labelled training samples. Current works have shown that preserving spatial information and comparing video descriptors are crucial for few-shot action recognition. However, the importance of preserving temporal information is not well discussed. In this paper, we propose a Contents and Length-based Temporal Attention (CLTA) model, which learns customized temporal attention for the individual video to tackle the few-shot action recognition problem. CLTA utilizes the Gaussian likelihoo…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科技创新研究中心）
Recent progress on action recognition has mainly focused on RGB and optical flow features. In this paper, we approach the problem of joint-based action recognition. Unlike other modalities, constellation of joints and their motion generate models with succinct human motion information for activity recognition. We present a new model for joint-based action recognition, which first extracts motion features from each joint separately through a shared motion encoder before performing collective reasoning. Our joint selector module re-weights the joint information to select the most discriminative …
Unintentional actions are rare occurrences that are difficult to define precisely and that are highly dependent on the temporal context of the action. In this work, we explore such actions and seek to identify the points in videos where the actions transition from intentional to unintentional. We propose a multi-stage framework that exploits inherent biases such as motion speed, motion direction, and order to recognize unintentional actions. To enhance representations via self-supervised training for the task of unintentional action recognition we propose temporal transformations, called Tempo…
