No Arabic abstract
We address the problem of temporal activity detection in continuous, untrimmed video streams. This is a difficult task that requires extracting meaningful spatio-temporal features to capture activities, accurately localizing the start and end times of each activity. We introduce a new model, Region Convolutional 3D Network (R-C3D), which encodes the video streams using a three-dimensional fully convolutional network, then generates candidate temporal regions containing activities and finally classifies selected regions into specific activities. Computation is saved due to the sharing of convolutional features between the proposal and the classification pipelines. We further improve the detection performance by efficiently integrating an optical flow based motion stream with the original RGB stream. The two-stream network is jointly optimized by fusing the flow and RGB feature maps at different levels. Additionally, the training stage incorporates an online hard example mining strategy to address the extreme foreground-background imbalance typically observed in any detection pipeline. Instead of heuristically sampling the candidate segments for the final activity classification stage, we rank them according to their performance and only select the worst performers to update the model. This improves the model without heavy hyper-parameter tuning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets are carried out to show superior performance over existing temporal activity detection methods. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the THUMOS14 and Charades datasets. We further demonstrate that our model is a general temporal activity detection framework that does not rely on assumptions about particular dataset properties by evaluating our approach on the ActivityNet dataset.
Understanding the world in 3D is a critical component of urban autonomous driving. Generally, the combination of expensive LiDAR sensors and stereo RGB imaging has been paramount for successful 3D object detection algorithms, whereas monocular image-only methods experience drastically reduced performance. We propose to reduce the gap by reformulating the monocular 3D detection problem as a standalone 3D region proposal network. We leverage the geometric relationship of 2D and 3D perspectives, allowing 3D boxes to utilize well-known and powerful convolutional features generated in the image-space. To help address the strenuous 3D parameter estimations, we further design depth-aware convolutional layers which enable location specific feature development and in consequence improved 3D scene understanding. Compared to prior work in monocular 3D detection, our method consists of only the proposed 3D region proposal network rather than relying on external networks, data, or multiple stages. M3D-RPN is able to significantly improve the performance of both monocular 3D Object Detection and Birds Eye View tasks within the KITTI urban autonomous driving dataset, while efficiently using a shared multi-class model.
State-of-the-art temporal action detectors to date are based on two-stream input including RGB frames and optical flow. Although combining RGB frames and optical flow boosts performance significantly, optical flow is a hand-designed representation which not only requires heavy computation, but also makes it methodologically unsatisfactory that two-stream methods are often not learned end-to-end jointly with the flow. In this paper, we argue that optical flow is dispensable in high-accuracy temporal action detection and image level data augmentation (ILDA) is the key solution to avoid performance degradation when optical flow is removed. To evaluate the effectiveness of ILDA, we design a simple yet efficient one-stage temporal action detector based on single RGB stream named DaoTAD. Our results show that when trained with ILDA, DaoTAD has comparable accuracy with all existing state-of-the-art two-stream detectors while surpassing the inference speed of previous methods by a large margin and the inference speed is astounding 6668 fps on GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Code is available at url{https://github.com/Media-Smart/vedatad}.
Analyzing videos of human actions involves understanding the temporal relationships among video frames. State-of-the-art action recognition approaches rely on traditional optical flow estimation methods to pre-compute motion information for CNNs. Such a two-stage approach is computationally expensive, storage demanding, and not end-to-end trainable. In this paper, we present a novel CNN architecture that implicitly captures motion information between adjacent frames. We name our approach hidden two-stream CNNs because it only takes raw video frames as input and directly predicts action classes without explicitly computing optical flow. Our end-to-end approach is 10x faster than its two-stage baseline. Experimental results on four challenging action recognition datasets: UCF101, HMDB51, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.2 show that our approach significantly outperforms the previous best real-time approaches.
The ability to identify and temporally segment fine-grained human actions throughout a video is crucial for robotics, surveillance, education, and beyond. Typical approaches decouple this problem by first extracting local spatiotemporal features from video frames and then feeding them into a temporal classifier that captures high-level temporal patterns. We introduce a new class of temporal models, which we call Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), that use a hierarchy of temporal convolutions to perform fine-grained action segmentation or detection. Our Encoder-Decoder TCN uses pooling and upsampling to efficiently capture long-range temporal patterns whereas our Dilated TCN uses dilated convolutions. We show that TCNs are capable of capturing action compositions, segment durations, and long-range dependencies, and are over a magnitude faster to train than competing LSTM-based Recurrent Neural Networks. We apply these models to three challenging fine-grained datasets and show large improvements over the state of the art.
An integral part of video analysis and surveillance is temporal activity detection, which means to simultaneously recognize and localize activities in long untrimmed videos. Currently, the most effective methods of temporal activity detection are based on deep learning, and they typically perform very well with large scale annotated videos for training. However, these methods are limited in real applications due to the unavailable videos about certain activity classes and the time-consuming data annotation. To solve this challenging problem, we propose a novel task setting called zero-shot temporal activity detection (ZSTAD), where activities that have never been seen in training can still be detected. We design an end-to-end deep network based on R-C3D as the architecture for this solution. The proposed network is optimized with an innovative loss function that considers the embeddings of activity labels and their super-classes while learning the common semantics of seen and unseen activities. Experiments on both the THUMOS14 and the Charades datasets show promising performance in terms of detecting unseen activities.