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Temporal action proposal generation aims to estimate temporal intervals of actions in untrimmed videos, which is a challenging yet important task in the video understanding field. The proposals generated by current methods still suffer from inaccurate temporal boundaries and inferior confidence used for retrieval owing to the lack of efficient temporal modeling and effective boundary context utilization. In this paper, we propose Temporal Context Aggregation Network (TCANet) to generate high-quality action proposals through local and global temporal context aggregation and complementary as well as progressive boundary refinement. Specifically, we first design a Local-Global Temporal Encoder (LGTE), which adopts the channel grouping strategy to efficiently encode both local and global temporal inter-dependencies. Furthermore, both the boundary and internal context of proposals are adopted for frame-level and segment-level boundary regressions, respectively. Temporal Boundary Regressor (TBR) is designed to combine these two regression granularities in an end-to-end fashion, which achieves the precise boundaries and reliable confidence of proposals through progressive refinement. Extensive experiments are conducted on three challenging datasets: HACS, ActivityNet-v1.3, and THUMOS-14, where TCANet can generate proposals with high precision and recall. By combining with the existing action classifier, TCANet can obtain remarkable temporal action detection performance compared with other methods. Not surprisingly, the proposed TCANet won the 1$^{st}$ place in the CVPR 2020 - HACS challenge leaderboard on temporal action localization task.
This technical report presents our solution for temporal action detection task in AcitivityNet Challenge 2021. The purpose of this task is to locate and identify actions of interest in long untrimmed videos. The crucial challenge of the task comes from that the temporal duration of action varies dramatically, and the target actions are typically embedded in a background of irrelevant activities. Our solution builds on BMN, and mainly contains three steps: 1) action classification and feature encoding by Slowfast, CSN and ViViT; 2) proposal generation. We improve BMN by embedding the proposed Proposal Relation Network (PRN), by which we can generate proposals of high quality; 3) action detection. We calculate the detection results by assigning the proposals with corresponding classification results. Finally, we ensemble the results under different settings and achieve 44.7% on the test set, which improves the champion result in ActivityNet 2020 by 1.9% in terms of average mAP.
In this technical report, we describe our solution to temporal action proposal (task 1) in ActivityNet Challenge 2019. First, we fine-tune a ResNet-50-C3D CNN on ActivityNet v1.3 based on Kinetics pretrained model to extract snippet-level video representations and then we design a Relation-Aware Pyramid Network (RapNet) to generate temporal multiscale proposals with confidence score. After that, we employ a two-stage snippet-level boundary adjustment scheme to re-rank the order of generated proposals. Ensemble methods are also been used to improve the performance of our solution, which helps us achieve 2nd place.
Temporal action proposal generation is an important yet challenging problem, since temporal proposals with rich action content are indispensable for analysing real-world videos with long duration and high proportion irrelevant content. This problem requires methods not only generating proposals with precise temporal boundaries, but also retrieving proposals to cover truth action instances with high recall and high overlap using relatively fewer proposals. To address these difficulties, we introduce an effective proposal generation method, named Boundary-Sensitive Network (BSN), which adopts local to global fashion. Locally, BSN first locates temporal boundaries with high probabilities, then directly combines these boundaries as proposals. Globally, with Boundary-Sensitive Proposal feature, BSN retrieves proposals by evaluating the confidence of whether a proposal contains an action within its region. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14, where BSN outperforms other state-of-the-art temporal action proposal generation methods with high recall and high temporal precision. Finally, further experiments demonstrate that by combining existing action classifiers, our method significantly improves the state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.
The object of Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WS-TAL) is to localize all action instances in an untrimmed video with only video-level supervision. Due to the lack of frame-level annotations during training, current WS-TAL methods rely on attention mechanisms to localize the foreground snippets or frames that contribute to the video-level classification task. This strategy frequently confuse context with the actual action, in the localization result. Separating action and context is a core problem for precise WS-TAL, but it is very challenging and has been largely ignored in the literature. In this paper, we introduce an Action-Context Separation Network (ACSNet) that explicitly takes into account context for accurate action localization. It consists of two branches (i.e., the Foreground-Background branch and the Action-Context branch). The Foreground- Background branch first distinguishes foreground from background within the entire video while the Action-Context branch further separates the foreground as action and context. We associate video snippets with two latent components (i.e., a positive component and a negative component), and their different combinations can effectively characterize foreground, action and context. Furthermore, we introduce extended labels with auxiliary context categories to facilitate the learning of action-context separation. Experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.2/v1.3 datasets demonstrate the ACSNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art WS-TAL methods by a large margin.
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to localize action instances temporal boundary and identify the corresponding action category with only video-level labels. Traditional methods mainly focus on foreground and background frames separation with only a single attention branch and class activation sequence. However, we argue that apart from the distinctive foreground and background frames there are plenty of semantically ambiguous action context frames. It does not make sense to group those context frames to the same background class since they are semantically related to a specific action category. Consequently, it is challenging to suppress action context frames with only a single class activation sequence. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an action-context modeling network termed ACM-Net, which integrates a three-branch attention module to measure the likelihood of each temporal point being action instance, context, or non-action background, simultaneously. Then based on the obtained three-branch attention values, we construct three-branch class activation sequences to represent the action instances, contexts, and non-action backgrounds, individually. To evaluate the effectiveness of our ACM-Net, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3. The experiments show that our method can outperform current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieve comparable performance with fully-supervised methods. Code can be found at https://github.com/ispc-lab/ACM-Net