Derived from rapid advances in computer vision and machine learning, video analysis tasks have been moving from inferring the present state to predicting the future state. Vision-based action recognition and prediction from videos are such tasks, where action recognition is to infer human actions (present state) based upon complete action executions, and action prediction to predict human actions (future state) based upon incomplete action executions. These two tasks have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as visual surveillance, autonomous driving vehicle, entertainment, and video retrieval, etc. Many attempts have been devoted in the last a few decades in order to build a robust and effective framework for action recognition and prediction. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in the action recognition and prediction. Existing models, popular algorithms, technical difficulties, popular action databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions.

Human Action Recognition and Prediction: A Survey.

Temporal action detection is a fundamental yet challenging task in video understanding. Video context is a critical cue to effectively detect actions, but current works mainly focus on temporal context, while neglecting semantic context as well as other important context properties. In this work, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN) model to adaptively incorporate multi-level semantic context into video features and cast temporal action detection as a sub-graph localization problem. Specifically, we formulate video snippets as graph nodes, snippet-snippet correlations as edges, and actions associated with context as target sub-graphs. With graph convolution as the basic operation, we design a GCN block called GCNeXt, which learns the features of each node by aggregating its context and dynamically updates the edges in the graph. To localize each sub-graph, we also design an SGAlign layer to embed each sub-graph into the Euclidean space. Extensive experiments show that G-TAD is capable of finding effective video context without extra supervision and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two detection benchmarks. On ActivityNet-1.3 it obtains an average mAP of 34.09%; on THUMOS14 it reaches 51.6% at IoU@0.5 when combined with a proposal processing method. The code has been made available at https://github.com/frostinassiky/gtad.

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G-TAD: Sub-Graph Localization for Temporal Action Detection

Temporally locating and classifying action segments in long untrimmed videos is of particular interest to many applications like surveillance and robotics. While traditional approaches follow a two-step pipeline, by generating frame-wise probabilities and then feeding them to high-level temporal models, recent approaches use temporal convolutions to directly classify the video frames. In this paper, we introduce a multi-stage architecture for the temporal action segmentation task. Each stage features a set of dilated temporal convolutions to generate an initial prediction that is refined by the next one. This architecture is trained using a combination of a classification loss and a proposed smoothing loss that penalizes over-segmentation errors. Extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed model in capturing long-range dependencies and recognizing action segments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset.

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MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation

This paper introduces the pipeline to extend the largest dataset in egocentric vision, EPIC-KITCHENS. The effort culminates in EPIC-KITCHENS-100, a collection of 100 hours, 20M frames, 90K actions in 700 variable-length videos, capturing long-term unscripted activities in 45 environments, using head-mounted cameras. Compared to its previous version (Damen in Scaling egocentric vision: ECCV, 2018), EPIC-KITCHENS-100 has been annotated using a novel pipeline that allows denser (54% more actions per minute) and more complete annotations of fine-grained actions (+128% more action segments). This collection enables new challenges such as action detection and evaluating the “test of time”—i.e. whether models trained on data collected in 2018 can generalise to new footage collected two years later. The dataset is aligned with 6 challenges: action recognition (full and weak supervision), action detection, action anticipation, cross-modal retrieval (from captions), as well as unsupervised domain adaptation for action recognition. For each challenge, we define the task, provide baselines and evaluation metrics.

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Rescaling Egocentric Vision: Collection, Pipeline and Challenges for EPIC-KITCHENS-100

Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging task in video understanding. Typically, such a task aims at inferring both the action category and localization of the start and end frame for each action instance in a long, untrimmed video. While most current models achieve good results by using pre-defined anchors and numerous actionness, such methods could be bothered with both large number of outputs and heavy tuning of locations and sizes corresponding to different anchors. Instead, anchor-free methods is lighter, getting rid of redundant hyper-parameters, but gains few attention. In this paper, we propose the first purely anchor-free temporal localization method, which is both efficient and effective. Our model includes (i) an end-to-end trainable basic predictor, (ii) a saliency-based refinement module to gather more valuable boundary features for each proposal with a novel boundary pooling, and (iii) several consistency constraints to make sure our model can find the accurate boundary given arbitrary proposals. Extensive experiments show that our method beats all anchor-based and actionness-guided methods with a remarkable margin on THUMOS14, achieving state-of-the-art results, and comparable ones on ActivityNet v1.3. Code is available at https://github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/ActionDetection-AFSD.

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Learning Salient Boundary Feature for Anchor-free Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action proposal generation is an challenging and promising task which aims to locate temporal regions in real-world videos where action or event may occur. Current bottom-up proposal generation methods can generate proposals with precise boundary, but cannot efficiently generate adequately reliable confidence scores for retrieving proposals. To address these difficulties, we introduce the Boundary-Matching (BM) mechanism to evaluate confidence scores of densely distributed proposals, which denote a proposal as a matching pair of starting and ending boundaries and combine all densely distributed BM pairs into the BM confidence map. Based on BM mechanism, we propose an effective, efficient and end-to-end proposal generation method, named Boundary-Matching Network (BMN), which generates proposals with precise temporal boundaries as well as reliable confidence scores simultaneously. The two-branches of BMN are jointly trained in an unified framework. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3, where BMN shows significant performance improvement with remarkable efficiency and generalizability. Further, combining with existing action classifier, BMN can achieve state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.

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BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Inpainting arbitrary missing regions is challenging because learning valid features for various masked regions is nontrivial. Though U-shaped encoder-decoder frameworks have been witnessed to be successful, most of them share a common drawback of mask unawareness in feature extraction because all convolution windows (or regions), including those with various shapes of missing pixels, are treated equally and filtered with fixed learned kernels. To this end, we propose our novel mask-aware inpainting solution. Firstly, a Mask-Aware Dynamic Filtering (MADF) module is designed to effectively learn multi-scale features for missing regions in the encoding phase. Specifically, filters for each convolution window are generated from features of the corresponding region of the mask. The second fold of mask awareness is achieved by adopting Point-wise Normalization (PN) in our decoding phase, considering that statistical natures of features at masked points differentiate from those of unmasked points. The proposed PN can tackle this issue by dynamically assigning point-wise scaling factor and bias. Lastly, our model is designed to be an end-to-end cascaded refinement one. Supervision information such as reconstruction loss, perceptual loss and total variation loss is incrementally leveraged to boost the inpainting results from coarse to fine. Effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated both quantitatively and qualitatively via extensive experiments on three public datasets including Places2, CelebA and Paris StreetView.

Image Inpainting by End-to-End Cascaded Refinement with Mask Awareness

Fast arbitrary neural style transfer has attracted widespread attention from academic, industrial and art communities due to its flexibility in enabling various applications. Existing solutions either attentively fuse deep style feature into deep content feature without considering feature distributions, or adaptively normalize deep content feature according to the style such that their global statistics are matched. Although effective, leaving shallow feature unexplored and without locally considering feature statistics, they are prone to unnatural output with unpleasing local distortions. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel attention and normalization module, named Adaptive Attention Normalization (AdaAttN), to adaptively perform attentive normalization on per-point basis. Specifically, spatial attention score is learnt from both shallow and deep features of content and style images. Then per-point weighted statistics are calculated by regarding a style feature point as a distribution of attention-weighted output of all style feature points. Finally, the content feature is normalized so that they demonstrate the same local feature statistics as the calculated per-point weighted style feature statistics. Besides, a novel local feature loss is derived based on AdaAttN to enhance local visual quality. We also extend AdaAttN to be ready for video style transfer with slight modifications. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art arbitrary image/video style transfer. Codes and models are available.

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AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer

Artistic style transfer aims at migrating the style from an example image to a content image. Currently, optimization-based methods have achieved great stylization quality, but expensive time cost restricts their practical applications. Meanwhile, feed-forward methods still fail to synthesize complex style, especially when holistic global and local patterns exist. Inspired by the common painting process of drawing a draft and revising the details, we introduce a novel feed-forward method named Laplacian Pyramid Network (LapStyle). LapStyle first transfers global style patterns in low-resolution via a Drafting Network. It then revises the local details in high-resolution via a Revision Network, which hallucinates a residual image according to the draft and the image textures extracted by Laplacian filtering. Higher resolution details can be easily generated by stacking Revision Networks with multiple Laplacian pyramid levels. The final stylized image is obtained by aggregating outputs of all pyramid levels. Experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high quality stylized images in real time, where holistic style patterns are properly transferred.

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Li Xin

Papers

BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation

BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Image Inpainting by End-to-End Cascaded Refinement with Mask Awareness

AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer

Drafting and Revision: Laplacian Pyramid Network for Fast High-Quality Artistic Style Transfer