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 large-scale and fine-grained video dataset, coined as FineAction, for temporal action localization. In total, FineAction contains 103K temporal instances of 106 action categories, annotated in 17K untrimmed videos. FineAction introduces new opportunities and challenges for temporal action localization, thanks to its distinct characteristics of fine action classes with rich diversity, dense annotations of multiple instances, and co-occurring actions of different classes. To benchmark FineAction, we systematically investigate the performance of several popular temporal localization methods on it, and deeply analyze the influence of short-duration and fine-grained instances in temporal action localization. We believe that FineAction can advance research of temporal action localization and beyond.
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