Discovering A Variety of Objects in Spatio-Temporal Human-Object Interactions

Spatio-temporal Human-Object Interaction (ST-HOI) detection aims at detecting HOIs from videos, which is crucial for activity understanding. In daily HOIs, humans often interact with a variety of objects, e.g., holding and touching dozens of household items in cleaning. However, existing whole body-object interaction video benchmarks usually provide limited object classes. Here, we introduce a new benchmark based on AVA: Discovering Interacted Objects (DIO) including 51 interactions and 1,000+ objects. Accordingly, an ST-HOI learning task is proposed expecting vision systems to track human actors, detect interactions and simultaneously discover interacted objects. Even though today's detectors/trackers excel in object detection/tracking tasks, they perform unsatisfied to localize diverse/unseen objects in DIO. This profoundly reveals the limitation of current vision systems and poses a great challenge. Thus, how to leverage spatio-temporal cues to address object discovery is explored, and a Hierarchical Probe Network (HPN) is devised to discover interacted objects utilizing hierarchical spatio-temporal human/context cues. In extensive experiments, HPN demonstrates impressive performance. Data and code are available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/HAKE-AVA.

MVP: Robust Multi-View Practice for Driving Action Localization

Distracted driving causes thousands of deaths per year, and how to apply deep-learning methods to prevent these tragedies has become a crucial problem. In Track3 of the 6th AI City Challenge, researchers provide a high-quality video dataset with densely action annotations. Due to the small data scale and unclear action boundary, the dataset presents a unique challenge to precisely localize all the different actions and classify their categories. In this paper, we make good use of the multi-view synchronization among videos, and conduct robust Multi-View Practice (MVP) for driving action localization. To avoid overfitting, we fine-tune SlowFast with Kinetics-700 pre-training as the feature extractor. Then the features of different views are passed to ActionFormer to generate candidate action proposals. For precisely localizing all the actions, we design elaborate post-processing, including model voting, threshold filtering and duplication removal. The results show that our MVP is robust for driving action localization, which achieves 28.49% F1-score in the Track3 test set.

Regularity Learning via Explicit Distribution Modeling for Skeletal Video Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in surveillance videos is challenging and important for ensuring public security. Different from pixel-based anomaly detection methods, pose-based methods utilize highly-structured skeleton data, which decreases the computational burden and also avoids the negative impact of background noise. However, unlike pixel-based methods, which could directly exploit explicit motion features such as optical flow, pose-based methods suffer from the lack of alternative dynamic representation. In this paper, a novel Motion Embedder (ME) is proposed to provide a pose motion representation from the probability perspective. Furthermore, a novel task-specific Spatial-Temporal Transformer (STT) is deployed for self-supervised pose sequence reconstruction. These two modules are then integrated into a unified framework for pose regularity learning, which is referred to as Motion Prior Regularity Learner (MoPRL). MoPRL achieves the state-of-the-art performance by an average improvement of 4.7% AUC on several challenging datasets. Extensive experiments validate the versatility of each proposed module.

Transferable Knowledge-Based Multi-Granularity Aggregation Network for Temporal Action Localization: Submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2021

This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to 2021 HACS Temporal Action Localization Challenge on both Supervised Learning Track and Weakly-Supervised Learning Track. Temporal Action Localization (TAL) requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. However, Weakly-Supervised TAL indicates locating the action instances using only video-level class labels. In this paper, to train a supervised temporal action localizer, we adopt 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. As for the WSTAL, a novel framework is proposed to handle the poor quality of CAS generated by simple classification network, which can only focus on local discriminative parts, rather than locate the entire interval of target actions. Further inspired by the transfer learning method, we also adopt an additional module to transfer the knowledge from trimmed videos (HACS Clips dataset) to untrimmed videos (HACS Segments dataset), aiming at promoting the classification performance on untrimmed videos. Finally, we employ a boundary regression module embedded with Outer-Inner-Contrastive (OIC) loss to automatically predict the boundaries based on the enhanced CAS. Our proposed scheme achieves 39.91 and 29.78 average mAP on the challenge testing set of supervised and weakly-supervised temporal action localization track respectively.

TSI: Temporal Saliency Integration for Video Action Recognition

Efficient spatiotemporal modeling is an important yet challenging problem for video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods exploit motion clues to assist in short-term temporal modeling through temporal difference over consecutive frames. However, background noises will be inevitably introduced due to the camera movement. Besides, movements of different actions can vary greatly. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Saliency Integration (TSI) block, which mainly contains a Salient Motion Excitation (SME) module and a Cross-scale Temporal Integration (CTI) module. Specifically, SME aims to highlight the motion-sensitive area through local-global motion modeling, where the background suppression and pyramidal feature difference are conducted successively between neighboring frames to capture motion dynamics with less background noises. CTI is designed to perform multi-scale temporal modeling through a group of separate 1D convolutions respectively. Meanwhile, temporal interactions across different scales are integrated with attention mechanism. Through these two modules, long short-term temporal relationships can be encoded efficiently by introducing limited additional parameters. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something v1 & v2, Kinetics-400, UCF-101, and HMDB-51), which demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method.

Temporal Context Aggregation Network for Temporal Action Proposal Refinement

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.

Collaborative Distillation in the Parameter and Spectrum Domains for Video Action Recognition

Recent years have witnessed the significant progress of action recognition task with deep networks. However, most of current video networks require large memory and computational resources, which hinders their applications in practice. Existing knowledge distillation methods are limited to the image-level spatial domain, ignoring the temporal and frequency information which provide structural knowledge and are important for video analysis. This paper explores how to train small and efficient networks for action recognition. Specifically, we propose two distillation strategies in the frequency domain, namely the feature spectrum and parameter distribution distillations respectively. Our insight is that appealing performance of action recognition requires \textit{explicitly} modeling the temporal frequency spectrum of video features. Therefore, we introduce a spectrum loss that enforces the student network to mimic the temporal frequency spectrum from the teacher network, instead of \textit{implicitly} distilling features as many previous works. Second, the parameter frequency distribution is further adopted to guide the student network to learn the appearance modeling process from the teacher. Besides, a collaborative learning strategy is presented to optimize the training process from a probabilistic view. Extensive experiments are conducted on several action recognition benchmarks, such as Kinetics, Something-Something, and Jester, which consistently verify effectiveness of our approach, and demonstrate that our method can achieve higher performance than state-of-the-art methods with the same backbone.

BSN++: Complementary Boundary Regressor with Scale-Balanced Relation Modeling for Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Generating human action proposals in untrimmed videos is an important yet challenging task with wide applications. Current methods often suffer from the noisy boundary locations and the inferior quality of confidence scores used for proposal retrieving. In this paper, we present BSN++, a new framework which exploits complementary boundary regressor and relation modeling for temporal proposal generation. First, we propose a novel boundary regressor based on the complementary characteristics of both starting and ending boundary classifiers. Specifically, we utilize the U-shaped architecture with nested skip connections to capture rich contexts and introduce bi-directional boundary matching mechanism to improve boundary precision. Second, to account for the proposal-proposal relations ignored in previous methods, we devise a proposal relation block to which includes two self-attention modules from the aspects of position and channel. Furthermore, we find that there inevitably exists data imbalanced problems in the positive/negative proposals and temporal durations, which harm the model performance on tail distributions. To relieve this issue, we introduce the scale-balanced re-sampling strategy. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular benchmarks: ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14, which demonstrate that BSN++ achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Complementary Boundary Generator with Scale-Invariant Relation Modeling for Temporal Action Localization: Submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2020

This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2020 Task 1 (\textbf{temporal action localization/detection}). Temporal action localization requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. In this paper, we decouple the temporal action localization task into two stages (i.e. proposal generation and classification) and enrich the proposal diversity through exhaustively exploring the influences of multiple components from different but complementary perspectives. Specifically, in order to generate high-quality proposals, we consider several factors including the video feature encoder, the proposal generator, the proposal-proposal relations, the scale imbalance, and ensemble strategy. Finally, in order to obtain accurate detections, we need to further train an optimal video classifier to recognize the generated proposals. Our proposed scheme achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the temporal action localization task with \textbf{42.26} average mAP on the challenge testing set.

Multi-Granularity Fusion Network for Proposal and Activity Localization: Submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2019 Task 1 and Task 2

This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2019 Task 1 (\textbf{temporal action proposal generation}) and Task 2 (\textbf{temporal action localization/detection}). Temporal action proposal indicates the temporal intervals containing the actions and plays an important role in temporal action localization. Top-down and bottom-up methods are the two main categories used for proposal generation in the existing literature. In this paper, we devise a novel Multi-Granularity Fusion Network (MGFN) to combine the proposals generated from different frameworks for complementary filtering and confidence re-ranking. Specifically, we consider the diversity comprehensively from multiple perspectives, e.g. the characteristic aspect, the data aspect, the model aspect and the result aspect. Our MGFN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the temporal action proposal task with 69.85 AUC score and the temporal action localization task with 38.90 mAP on the challenge testing set.