TR2018-109

Online Detection of Action Start in Untrimmed, Streaming Videos


    •  Shou, Z., Pan, J., Chan, J., Miyazawa, K., Mansour, H., Vetro, A., Giro-i-Nieto, X., Chang, S.-F., "Online Detection of Action Start in Untrimmed, Streaming Videos", European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September 2018.
      BibTeX TR2018-109 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Shou2018sep,
      • author = {Shou, Zheng and Pan, Junting and Chan, Jonathan and Miyazawa, Kazuyuki and Mansour, Hassan and Vetro, Anthony and Giro-i-Nieto, Xavier and Chang, Shi-Fu},
      • title = {Online Detection of Action Start in Untrimmed, Streaming Videos},
      • booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
      • year = 2018,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2018-109}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision

Abstract:

We aim to tackle a novel task in action detection - Online Detection of Action Start (ODAS) in untrimmed, streaming videos. The goal of ODAS is to detect the start of an action instance, with high categorization accuracy and low detection latency. ODAS is important in many applications such as early alert generation to allow timely security or emergency response. We propose three novel methods to specifically address the challenges in training ODAS models: (1) hard negative samples generation based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to distinguish ambiguous background, (2) explicitly modeling the temporal consistency between data around action start and data succeeding action start, and (3) adaptive sampling strategy to handle the scarcity of training data. We conduct extensive experiments using THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet. We show that our proposed methods lead to significant performance gains and improve the state-of-the-art methods. An ablation study confirms the effectiveness of each proposed method.