In this work, we propose a motion embedding strategy known as motion codes, which is a vectorized representation of motions based on a manipulation's salient mechanical attributes. These motion codes provide a robust motion representation, and they are obtained using a hierarchy of features called the motion taxonomy. We developed and trained a deep neural network model that combines visual and semantic features to identify the features found in our motion taxonomy to embed or annotate videos with motion codes. To demonstrate the potential of motion codes as features for machine learning tasks, we integrated the extracted features from the motion embedding model into the current state-of-the-art action recognition model. The obtained model achieved higher accuracy than the baseline model for the verb classification task on egocentric videos from the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset.
Kapital Bank（资本银行）；Khazar University（哈扎尔大学）；Consumer Experience Tribe（消费者体验部落）；Lumos Extension（Lumos扩展）；School of Data（数据学院）
Recognizing human actions based on videos has became one of the most popular areas of research in computer vision in recent years. This area has many applications such as surveillance, robotics, health care, video search and human-computer interaction. There are many problems associated with recognizing human actions in videos such as cluttered backgrounds, obstructions, viewpoints variation, execution speed and camera movement. A large number of methods have been proposed to solve the problems. This paper focus on spatial and temporal pattern recognition for the classification of videos using…
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.
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…
While video action recognition has been an active area of research for several years, zero-shot action recognition has only recently started gaining traction. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end trained transformer model which is capable of capturing long range spatiotemporal dependencies efficiently, contrary to existing approaches which use 3D-CNNs. Moreover, to address a common ambiguity in the existing works about classes that can be considered as previously unseen, we propose a new experimentation setup that satisfies the zero-shot learning premise for action recognition by avoidi…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Heriot-Watt University Malaysia（赫瑞-瓦特大学马来西亚分校）
A primary challenge faced in few-shot action recognition is inadequate video data for training. To address this issue, current methods in this field mainly focus on devising algorithms at the feature level while little attention is paid to processing input video data. Moreover, existing frame sampling strategies may omit critical action information in temporal and spatial dimensions, which further impacts video utilization efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel video frame sampler for few-shot action recognition to address this issue, where task-specific spatial-temporal frame sampling …
Video-FocalNets: Spatio-Temporal Focal Modulation for Video Action Recognition
Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
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…
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…
In learning action recognition, models are typically pre-trained on object recognition with images, such as ImageNet, and later fine-tuned on target action recognition with videos. This approach has achieved good empirical performance especially with recent transformer-based video architectures. While recently many works aim to design more advanced transformer architectures for action recognition, less effort has been made on how to train video transformers. In this work, we explore several training paradigms and present two findings. First, video transformers benefit from joint training on di…
To understand human behaviors, action recognition based on videos is a common approach. Compared with image-based action recognition, videos provide much more information. Reducing the ambiguity of actions and in the last decade, many works focused on datasets, novel models and learning approaches have improved video action recognition to a higher level. However, there are challenges and unsolved problems, in particular in sports analytics where data collection and labeling are more sophisticated, requiring sport professionals to annotate data. In addition, the actions could be extremely fast …
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.
Current fully-supervised video datasets consist of only a few hundred thousand videos and fewer than a thousand domain-specific labels. This hinders the progress towards advanced video architectures. This paper presents an in-depth study of using large volumes of web videos for pre-training video models for the task of action recognition. Our primary empirical finding is that pre-training at a very large scale (over 65 million videos), despite on noisy social-media videos and hashtags, substantially improves the state-of-the-art on three challenging public action recognition datasets. Further,…
Video action recognition is one of the representative tasks for video understanding. Over the last decade, we have witnessed great advancements in video action recognition thanks to the emergence of deep learning. But we also encountered new challenges, including modeling long-range temporal information in videos, high computation costs, and incomparable results due to datasets and evaluation protocol variances. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of over 200 existing papers on deep learning for video action recognition. We first introduce the 17 video action recognition datasets …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
We present a system that demonstrates how the compositional structure of events, in concert with the compositional structure of language, can interplay with the underlying focusing mechanisms in video action recognition, thereby providing a medium, not only for top-down and bottom-up integration, but also for multi-modal integration between vision and language. We show how the roles played by participants (nouns), their characteristics (adjectives), the actions performed (verbs), the manner of such actions (adverbs), and changing spatial relations between participants (prepositions) in the for…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；NEC Corporation（日本电气股份有限公司）
The recent development of commodity 360$^{\circ}$ cameras have enabled a single video to capture an entire scene, which endows promising potentials in surveillance scenarios. However, research in omnidirectional video analysis has lagged behind the hardware advances. In this work, we address the important problem of action recognition in top-view 360$^{\circ}$ videos. Due to the wide filed-of-view, 360$^{\circ}$ videos usually capture multiple people performing actions at the same time. Furthermore, the appearance of people are deformed. The proposed framework first transforms omnidirectional …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose a self-supervised learning method to jointly reason about spatial and temporal context for video recognition. Recent self-supervised approaches have used spatial context [9, 34] as well as temporal coherency [32] but a combination of the two requires extensive preprocessing such as tracking objects through millions of video frames [59] or computing optical flow to determine frame regions with high motion [30]. We propose to combine spatial and temporal context in one self-supervised framework without any heavy preprocessing. We divide multiple video frames into grids of patches and …
Vision-based activity recognition is essential for security, monitoring and surveillance applications. Further, real-time analysis having low-quality video and contain less information about surrounding due to poor illumination, and occlusions. Therefore, it needs a more robust and integrated model for low quality and night security operations. In this context, we proposed a hybrid model for illumination invariant human activity recognition based on sub-image histogram equalization enhancement and k-key pose human silhouettes. This feature vector gives good average recognition accuracy on thre…
Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Most recent approaches for action recognition from video leverage deep architectures to encode the video clip into a fixed length representation vector that is then used for classification. For this to be successful, the network must be capable of suppressing irrelevant scene background and extract the representation from the most discriminative part of the video. Our contribution builds on the observation that spatio-temporal patterns characterizing actions in videos are highly correlated with objects and their location in the video. We propose Top-down Attention Action VLAD (TA-VLAD), a deep…
This paper presents a review of human activity recognition and behaviour understanding in video sequence. The key objective of this paper is to provide a general review on the overall process of a surveillance system used in the current trend. Visual surveillance system is directed on automatic identification of events of interest, especially on tracking and classification of moving objects. The processing step of the video surveillance system includes the following stages: Surrounding model, object representation, object tracking, activity recognition and behaviour understanding. It describes…
Static appearance of video may impede the ability of a deep neural network to learn motion-relevant features in video action recognition. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, Dynamic Appearance (DA), summarizing the appearance information relating to movement in a video while filtering out the static information considered unrelated to motion. We consider distilling the dynamic appearance from raw video data as a means of efficient video understanding. To this end, we propose the Pixel-Wise Temporal Projection (PWTP), which projects the static appearance of a video into a subspace within…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
In this paper, a novel signature of human action recognition, namely the curvature of a video sequence, is introduced. In this way, the distribution of sequential data is modeled, which enables few-shot learning. Instead of depending on recognizing features within images, our algorithm views actions as sequences on the universal time scale across a whole sequence of images. The video sequence, viewed as a curve in pixel space, is aligned by reparameterization using the arclength of the curve in pixel space. Once such curvatures are obtained, statistical indexes are extracted and fed into a lea…
Spatiotemporal action recognition is the task of locating and classifying actions in videos. Our project applies this task to analyzing video footage of restaurant workers preparing food, for which potential applications include automated checkout and inventory management. Such videos are quite different from the standardized datasets that researchers are used to, as they involve small objects, rapid actions, and notoriously unbalanced data classes. We explore two approaches. The first approach involves the familiar object detector You Only Look Once, and another applying a recently proposed a…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Recognising actions in videos relies on labelled supervision during training, typically the start and end times of each action instance. This supervision is not only subjective, but also expensive to acquire. Weak video-level supervision has been successfully exploited for recognition in untrimmed videos, however it is challenged when the number of different actions in training videos increases. We propose a method that is supervised by single timestamps located around each action instance, in untrimmed videos. We replace expensive action bounds with sampling distributions initialised from the…
Federal Institute of Paraná（巴拉那联邦学院）；Federal University of Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）
Zero-Shot Action Recognition has attracted attention in the last years and many approaches have been proposed for recognition of objects, events and actions in images and videos. There is a demand for methods that can classify instances from classes that are not present in the training of models, especially in the complex problem of automatic video understanding, since collecting, annotating and labeling videos are difficult and laborious tasks. We have identified that there are many methods available in the literature, however, it is difficult to categorize which techniques can be considered …
This paper presents a pure transformer-based approach, dubbed the Multi-Modal Video Transformer (MM-ViT), for video action recognition. Different from other schemes which solely utilize the decoded RGB frames, MM-ViT operates exclusively in the compressed video domain and exploits all readily available modalities, i.e., I-frames, motion vectors, residuals and audio waveform. In order to handle the large number of spatiotemporal tokens extracted from multiple modalities, we develop several scalable model variants which factorize self-attention across the space, time and modality dimensions. In …
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Cognex Deep Learning Lab（康耐视深度学习实验室）
Deep-Learning-based video recognition has shown promising improvements along with the development of large-scale datasets and spatiotemporal network architectures. In image recognition, learning spatially invariant features is a key factor in improving recognition performance and robustness. Data augmentation based on visual inductive priors, such as cropping, flipping, rotating, or photometric jittering, is a representative approach to achieve these features. Recent state-of-the-art recognition solutions have relied on modern data augmentation strategies that exploit a mixture of augmentation…
Video processing has become a popular research direction in computer vision due to its various applications such as video summarization, action recognition, etc. Recently, deep learning-based methods have achieved impressive results in action recognition. However, these methods need to process a full video sequence to recognize the action, even though most of these frames are similar and non-essential to recognizing a particular action. Additionally, these non-essential frames increase the computational cost and can confuse a method in action recognition. Instead, the important frames called k…
NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER欧洲实验室）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Deep learning for human action recognition in videos is making significant progress, but is slowed down by its dependency on expensive manual labeling of large video collections. In this work, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible…
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…
School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia（东英吉利大学计算科学学院）
Pixel space augmentation has grown in popularity in many Deep Learning areas, due to its effectiveness, simplicity, and low computational cost. Data augmentation for videos, however, still remains an under-explored research topic, as most works have been treating inputs as stacks of static images rather than temporally linked series of data. Recently, it has been shown that involving the time dimension when designing augmentations can be superior to its spatial-only variants for video action recognition. In this paper, we propose several novel enhancements to these techniques to strengthen the…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
With the recent surge in the research of vision transformers, they have demonstrated remarkable potential for various challenging computer vision applications, such as image recognition, point cloud classification as well as video understanding. In this paper, we present empirical results for training a stronger video vision transformer on the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Action Recognition dataset. Specifically, we explore training techniques for video vision transformers, such as augmentations, resolutions as well as initialization, etc. With our training recipe, a single ViViT model achieves the perfo…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Video Analytics Software as a Service (VA SaaS) has been rapidly growing in recent years. VA SaaS is typically accessed by users using a lightweight client. Because the transmission bandwidth between the client and cloud is usually limited and expensive, it brings great benefits to design cloud video analysis algorithms with a limited data transmission requirement. Although considerable research has been devoted to video analysis, to our best knowledge, little of them has paid attention to the transmission bandwidth limitation in SaaS. As the first attempt in this direction, this work introduc…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Action recognition in surveillance video makes our life safer by detecting the criminal events or predicting violent emergencies. However, efficient action recognition is not free of difficulty. First, there are so many action classes in daily life that we cannot pre-define all possible action classes beforehand. Moreover, it is very hard to collect real-word videos for certain particular actions such as steal and street fight due to legal restrictions and privacy protection. These challenges make existing data-driven recognition methods insufficient to attain desired performance. Zero-shot le…
Efficient video action recognition remains a challenging problem. One large model after another takes the place of the state-of-the-art on the Kinetics dataset, but real-world efficiency evaluations are often lacking. In this work, we fill this gap and investigate the use of transformers for efficient action recognition. We propose a novel, lightweight action recognition architecture, VideoLightFormer. In a factorized fashion, we carefully extend the 2D convolutional Temporal Segment Network with transformers, while maintaining spatial and temporal video structure throughout the entire model. …
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；INRIA Paris - Rocquencourt（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎-罗克库尔中心）
Automatically recognizing and localizing wide ranges of human actions has crucial importance for video understanding. Towards this goal, the THUMOS challenge was introduced in 2013 to serve as a benchmark for action recognition. Until then, video action recognition, including THUMOS challenge, had focused primarily on the classification of pre-segmented (i.e., trimmed) videos, which is an artificial task. In THUMOS 2014, we elevated action recognition to a more practical level by introducing temporally untrimmed videos. These also include `background videos' which share similar scenes and back…
Information Technology University（信息技术大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
The goal of human action recognition is to temporally or spatially localize the human action of interest in video sequences. Temporal localization (i.e. indicating the start and end frames of the action in a video) is referred to as frame-level detection. Spatial localization, which is more challenging, means to identify the pixels within each action frame that correspond to the action. This setting is usually referred to as pixel-level detection. In this chapter, we are using action, activity, event interchangeably.
We present a new action recognition deep neural network which adaptively learns the best action velocities in addition to the classification. While deep neural networks have reached maturity for image understanding tasks, we are still exploring network topologies and features to handle the richer environment of video clips. Here, we tackle the problem of multiple velocities in action recognition, and provide state-of-the-art results for gesture recognition, on known and new collected datasets. We further provide the training steps for our semi-supervised network, suited to learn from huge unla…
Humans can easily recognize actions with only a few examples given, while the existing video recognition models still heavily rely on the large-scale labeled data inputs. This observation has motivated an increasing interest in few-shot video action recognition, which aims at learning new actions with only very few labeled samples. In this paper, we propose a depth guided Adaptive Meta-Fusion Network for few-shot video recognition which is termed as AMeFu-Net. Concretely, we tackle the few-shot recognition problem from three aspects: firstly, we alleviate this extremely data-scarce problem by …
Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Existing deep learning methods for action recognition in videos require a large number of labeled videos for training, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. For the same action, the knowledge learned from different media types, e.g., videos and images, may be related and complementary. However, due to the domain shifts and heterogeneous feature representations between videos and images, the performance of classifiers trained on images may be dramatically degraded when directly deployed to videos. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Deep Image-to-Video Adaptation and Fusion N…
Human action recognition has become one of the most active field of research in computer vision due to its wide range of applications, like surveillance, medical, industrial environments, smart homes, among others. Recently, deep learning has been successfully used to learn powerful and interpretable features for recognizing human actions in videos. Most of the existing deep learning approaches have been designed for processing video information as RGB image sequences. For this reason, a preliminary decoding process is required, since video data are often stored in a compressed format. However…
Effective spatiotemporal feature representation is crucial to the video-based action recognition task. Focusing on discriminate spatiotemporal feature learning, we propose Information Fused Temporal Transformation Network (IF-TTN) for action recognition on top of popular Temporal Segment Network (TSN) framework. In the network, Information Fusion Module (IFM) is designed to fuse the appearance and motion features at multiple ConvNet levels for each video snippet, forming a short-term video descriptor. With fused features as inputs, Temporal Transformation Networks (TTN) are employed to model m…
In this paper, we propose a conditional early exiting framework for efficient video recognition. While existing works focus on selecting a subset of salient frames to reduce the computation costs, we propose to use a simple sampling strategy combined with conditional early exiting to enable efficient recognition. Our model automatically learns to process fewer frames for simpler videos and more frames for complex ones. To achieve this, we employ a cascade of gating modules to automatically determine the earliest point in processing where an inference is sufficiently reliable. We generate on-th…
A key challenge in video enhancement and action recognition is to fuse useful information from neighboring frames. Recent works suggest establishing accurate correspondences between neighboring frames before fusing temporal information. However, the generated results heavily depend on the quality of correspondence estimation. In this paper, we propose a more robust solution: \emph{sampling and fusing multi-level features} across neighborhood frames to generate the results. Based on this idea, we introduce a new module to improve the capability of 3D convolution, namely, learnable sampling 3D c…
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…
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…
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）
Data input modality plays an important role in video action recognition. Normally, there are three types of input: RGB, flow stream and compressed data. In this paper, we proposed a new input modality: gray stream. Specifically, taken the stacked consecutive 3 gray images as input, which is the same size of RGB, can not only skip the conversion process from video decoding data to RGB, but also improve the spatio-temporal modeling ability at zero computation and zero parameters. Meanwhile, we proposed a 1D Identity Channel-wise Spatio-temporal Convolution(1D-ICSC) which captures the temporal re…
V-SENSE；Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院）；ByteDance（字节跳动）
Most of existing video action recognition models ingest raw RGB frames. However, the raw video stream requires enormous storage and contains significant temporal redundancy. Video compression (e.g., H.264, MPEG-4) reduces superfluous information by representing the raw video stream using the concept of Group of Pictures (GOP). Each GOP is composed of the first I-frame (aka RGB image) followed by a number of P-frames, represented by motion vectors and residuals, which can be regarded and used as pre-extracted features. In this work, we 1) introduce sampling the input for the network from partia…
In the design of action recognition models, the quality of videos is an important issue; however, the trade-off between the quality and performance is often ignored. In general, action recognition models are trained on high-quality videos, hence it is not known how the model performance degrades when tested on low-quality videos, and how much the quality of training videos affects the performance. The issue of video quality is important, however, it has not been studied so far. The goal of this study is to show the trade-off between the performance and the quality of training and test videos b…
