We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

/pdf/going-deeper-with-convolutions-1yobw2o2ds.pdf

Going deeper with convolutions

We investigate architectures of discriminatively trained deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) for action recognition in video. The challenge is to capture the complementary information on appearance from still frames and motion between frames. We also aim to generalise the best performing hand-crafted features within a data-driven learning framework.

Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream ConvNet architecture which incorporates spatial and temporal networks. Second, we demonstrate that a ConvNet trained on multi-frame dense optical flow is able to achieve very good performance in spite of limited training data. Finally, we show that multitask learning, applied to two different action classification datasets, can be used to increase the amount of training data and improve the performance on both. Our architecture is trained and evaluated on the standard video actions benchmarks of UCF-101 and HMDB-51, where it is competitive with the state of the art. It also exceeds by a large margin previous attempts to use deep nets for video classification.

https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2014/file/00ec53c4682d36f5c4359f4ae7bd7ba1-Paper.pdf

Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos

The paucity of videos in current action classification datasets (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) has made it difficult to identify good video architectures, as most methods obtain similar performance on existing small-scale benchmarks. This paper re-evaluates state-of-the-art architectures in light of the new Kinetics Human Action Video dataset. Kinetics has two orders of magnitude more data, with 400 human action classes and over 400 clips per class, and is collected from realistic, challenging YouTube videos. We provide an analysis on how current architectures fare on the task of action classification on this dataset and how much performance improves on the smaller benchmark datasets after pre-training on Kinetics. We also introduce a new Two-Stream Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) that is based on 2D ConvNet inflation: filters and pooling kernels of very deep image classification ConvNets are expanded into 3D, making it possible to learn seamless spatio-temporal feature extractors from video while leveraging successful ImageNet architecture designs and even their parameters. We show that, after pre-training on Kinetics, I3D models considerably improve upon the state-of-the-art in action classification, reaching 80.2% on HMDB-51 and 97.9% on UCF-101.

/pdf/quo-vadis-action-recognition-a-new-model-and-the-kinetics-1jacvbzo22.pdf

Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset

We introduce UCF101 which is currently the largest dataset of human actions.
It consists of 101 action classes, over 13k clips and 27 hours of video data.
The database consists of realistic user uploaded videos containing camera
motion and cluttered background. Additionally, we provide baseline action
recognition results on this new dataset using standard bag of words approach
with overall performance of 44.5%. To the best of our knowledge, UCF101 is
currently the most challenging dataset of actions due to its large number of
classes, large number of clips and also unconstrained nature of such clips.

UCF101: A Dataset of 101 Human Actions Classes From Videos in The Wild

Models based on deep convolutional networks have dominated recent image interpretation tasks; we investigate whether models which are also recurrent, or "temporally deep", are effective for tasks involving sequences, visual and otherwise. We develop a novel recurrent convolutional architecture suitable for large-scale visual learning which is end-to-end trainable, and demonstrate the value of these models on benchmark video recognition tasks, image description and retrieval problems, and video narration challenges. In contrast to current models which assume a fixed spatio-temporal receptive field or simple temporal averaging for sequential processing, recurrent convolutional models are "doubly deep"' in that they can be compositional in spatial and temporal "layers". Such models may have advantages when target concepts are complex and/or training data are limited. Learning long-term dependencies is possible when nonlinearities are incorporated into the network state updates. Long-term RNN models are appealing in that they directly can map variable-length inputs (e.g., video frames) to variable length outputs (e.g., natural language text) and can model complex temporal dynamics; yet they can be optimized with backpropagation. Our recurrent long-term models are directly connected to modern visual convnet models and can be jointly trained to simultaneously learn temporal dynamics and convolutional perceptual representations. Our results show such models have distinct advantages over state-of-the-art models for recognition or generation which are separately defined and/or optimized.

Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description

With nearly one billion online videos viewed everyday, an emerging new frontier in computer vision research is recognition and search in video. While much effort has been devoted to the collection and annotation of large scalable static image datasets containing thousands of image categories, human action datasets lag far behind. Current action recognition databases contain on the order of ten different action categories collected under fairly controlled conditions. State-of-the-art performance on these datasets is now near ceiling and thus there is a need for the design and creation of new benchmarks. To address this issue we collected the largest action video database to-date with 51 action categories, which in total contain around 7,000 manually annotated clips extracted from a variety of sources ranging from digitized movies to YouTube. We use this database to evaluate the performance of two representative computer vision systems for action recognition and explore the robustness of these methods under various conditions such as camera motion, viewpoint, video quality and occlusion.

/pdf/hmdb-a-large-video-database-for-human-motion-recognition-djnqenrnnq.pdf

HMDB: A large video database for human motion recognition

This paper describes a framework for modeling human activities as temporally structured processes. Our approach is motivated by the inherently hierarchical nature of human activities and the close correspondence between human actions and speech: We model action units using Hidden Markov Models, much like words in speech. These action units then form the building blocks to model complex human activities as sentences using an action grammar. To evaluate our approach, we collected a large dataset of daily cooking activities: The dataset includes a total of 52 participants, each performing a total of 10 cooking activities in multiple real-life kitchens, resulting in over 77 hours of video footage. We evaluate the HTK toolkit, a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine, in combination with multiple video feature descriptors, for both the recognition of cooking activities (e.g., making pancakes) as well as the semantic parsing of videos into action units (e.g., cracking eggs). Our results demonstrate the benefits of structured temporal generative approaches over existing discriminative approaches in coping with the complexity of human daily life activities.

/pdf/the-language-of-actions-recovering-the-syntax-and-semantics-1o0ktios5l.pdf

The Language of Actions: Recovering the Syntax and Semantics of Goal-Directed Human Activities

We present an approach for weakly supervised learning of human actions. Given a set of videos and an ordered list of the occurring actions, the goal is to infer start and end frames of the related action classes within the video and to train the respective action classifiers without any need for hand labeled frame boundaries. To address this task, we propose a combination of a discriminative representation of subactions, modeled by a recurrent neural network, and a coarse probabilistic model to allow for a temporal alignment and inference over long sequences. While this system alone already generates good results, we show that the performance can be further improved by approximating the number of subactions to the characteristics of the different action classes. To this end, we adapt the number of subaction classes by iterating realignment and reestimation during training. The proposed system is evaluated on two benchmark datasets, the Breakfast and the Hollywood extended dataset, showing a competitive performance on various weak learning tasks such as temporal action segmentation and action alignment.

/pdf/weakly-supervised-action-learning-with-rnn-based-fine-to-18yhr3g1oi.pdf

Weakly Supervised Action Learning with RNN Based Fine-to-Coarse Modeling

We describe an end-to-end generative approach for the segmentation and recognition of human activities. In this approach, a visual representation based on reduced Fisher Vectors is combined with a structured temporal model for recognition. We show that the statistical properties of Fisher Vectors make them an especially suitable front-end for generative models such as Gaussian mixtures. The system is evaluated for both the recognition of complex activities as well as their parsing into action units. Using a variety of video datasets ranging from human cooking activities to animal behaviors, our experiments demonstrate that the resulting architecture outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for larger datasets, i.e. when sufficient amount of data is available for training structured generative models.

Hilde Kuehne

Papers

HMDB: A large video database for human motion recognition

The Language of Actions: Recovering the Syntax and Semantics of Goal-Directed Human Activities

Weakly Supervised Action Learning with RNN Based Fine-to-Coarse Modeling

An end-to-end generative framework for video segmentation and recognition

An end-to-end generative framework for video segmentation and recognition