Aayush Jung Rana

Rajat Modi, Aayush Jung Rana, Akash Kumar et al.

Beyond possessing large enough size to feed data hungry machines (eg, transformers), what attributes measure the quality of a dataset? Assuming that the definitions of such attributes do exist, how do we quantify among their relative existences? Our work attempts to explore these questions for video action detection. The task aims to spatio-temporally localize an actor and assign a relevant action class. We first analyze the existing datasets on video action detection and discuss their limitations. Next, we propose a new dataset, Multi Actor Multi Action (MAMA) which overcomes these limitations and is more suitable for real world applications. In addition, we perform a biasness study which analyzes a key property differentiating videos from static images: the temporal aspect. This reveals if the actions in these datasets really need the motion information of an actor, or whether they predict the occurrence of an action even by looking at a single frame. Finally, we investigate the widely held assumptions on the importance of temporal ordering: is temporal ordering important for detecting these actions? Such extreme experiments show existence of biases which have managed to creep into existing methods inspite of careful modeling.

Ayush Singh, Aayush J Rana, Akash Kumar et al.

In this work, we focus on label efficient learning for video action detection. We develop a novel semi-supervised active learning approach which utilizes both labeled as well as unlabeled data along with informative sample selection for action detection. Video action detection requires spatio-temporal localization along with classification, which poses several challenges for both active learning informative sample selection as well as semi-supervised learning pseudo label generation. First, we propose NoiseAug, a simple augmentation strategy which effectively selects informative samples for video action detection. Next, we propose fft-attention, a novel technique based on high-pass filtering which enables effective utilization of pseudo label for SSL in video action detection by emphasizing on relevant activity region within a video. We evaluate the proposed approach on three different benchmark datasets, UCF-101-24, JHMDB-21, and Youtube-VOS. First, we demonstrate its effectiveness on video action detection where the proposed approach outperforms prior works in semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning along with several baseline approaches in both UCF101-24 and JHMDB-21. Next, we also show its effectiveness on Youtube-VOS for video object segmentation demonstrating its generalization capability for other dense prediction tasks in videos. The code and models is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/AKASH2907/semi-sup-active-learning}.

Naman Biyani, Aayush J Rana, Shruti Vyas et al.

We present LARNet, a novel end-to-end approach for generating human action videos. A joint generative modeling of appearance and dynamics to synthesize a video is very challenging and therefore recent works in video synthesis have proposed to decompose these two factors. However, these methods require a driving video to model the video dynamics. In this work, we propose a generative approach instead, which explicitly learns action dynamics in latent space avoiding the need of a driving video during inference. The generated action dynamics is integrated with the appearance using a recurrent hierarchical structure which induces motion at different scales to focus on both coarse as well as fine level action details. In addition, we propose a novel mix-adversarial loss function which aims at improving the temporal coherency of synthesized videos. We evaluate the proposed approach on four real-world human action datasets demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach in generating human actions. Code available at https://github.com/aayushjr/larnet.

Aayush Rana, Akash Kumar, Vibhav Vineet et al.

Video action detection requires dense spatio-temporal annotations, which are both challenging and expensive to obtain. However, real-world videos often vary in difficulty and may not require the same level of annotation. This paper analyzes the appropriate annotation types for each sample and their impact on spatio-temporal video action detection. It focuses on two key aspects: 1) how to obtain varying levels of annotation for videos, and 2) how to learn action detection from different annotation types. The study explores video-level tags, points, scribbles, bounding boxes, and pixel-level masks. First, a simple active learning strategy is proposed to estimate the necessary annotation type for each video. Then, a novel spatio-temporal 3D-superpixel approach is introduced to generate pseudo-labels from these annotations, enabling effective training. The approach is validated on UCF101-24 and JHMDB-21 datasets, significantly cutting annotation costs with minimal performance loss.

Praveen Tirupattur, Aayush J Rana, Tushar Sangam et al.

This paper summarizes the TinyAction challenge which was organized in ActivityNet workshop at CVPR 2021. This challenge focuses on recognizing real-world low-resolution activities present in videos. Action recognition task is currently focused around classifying the actions from high-quality videos where the actors and the action is clearly visible. While various approaches have been shown effective for recognition task in recent works, they often do not deal with videos of lower resolution where the action is happening in a tiny region. However, many real world security videos often have the actual action captured in a small resolution, making action recognition in a tiny region a challenging task. In this work, we propose a benchmark dataset, TinyVIRAT-v2, which is comprised of naturally occuring low-resolution actions. This is an extension of the TinyVIRAT dataset and consists of actions with multiple labels. The videos are extracted from security videos which makes them realistic and more challenging. We use current state-of-the-art action recognition methods on the dataset as a benchmark, and propose the TinyAction Challenge.

Aayush J Rana, Yogesh S Rawat

We propose SSA2D, a simple yet effective end-to-end deep network for actor-action detection in videos. The existing methods take a top-down approach based on region-proposals (RPN), where the action is estimated based on the detected proposals followed by post-processing such as non-maximal suppression. While effective in terms of performance, these methods pose limitations in scalability for dense video scenes with a high memory requirement for thousands of proposals. We propose to solve this problem from a different perspective where we don't need any proposals. SSA2D is a unified network, which performs pixel level joint actor-action detection in a single-shot, where every pixel of the detected actor is assigned an action label. SSA2D has two main advantages: 1) It is a fully convolutional network which does not require any proposals and post-processing making it memory as well as time efficient, 2) It is easily scalable to dense video scenes as its memory requirement is independent of the number of actors present in the scene. We evaluate the proposed method on the Actor-Action dataset (A2D) and Video Object Relation (VidOR) dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in multiple actors and action detection in a video. SSA2D is 11x faster during inference with comparable (sometimes better) performance and fewer network parameters when compared with the prior works.

Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Ugur Demir, Praveen Tirupattur et al.

Activity detection in security videos is a difficult problem due to multiple factors such as large field of view, presence of multiple activities, varying scales and viewpoints, and its untrimmed nature. The existing research in activity detection is mainly focused on datasets, such as UCF-101, JHMDB, THUMOS, and AVA, which partially address these issues. The requirement of processing the security videos in real-time makes this even more challenging. In this work we propose Gabriella, a real-time online system to perform activity detection on untrimmed security videos. The proposed method consists of three stages: tubelet extraction, activity classification, and online tubelet merging. For tubelet extraction, we propose a localization network which takes a video clip as input and spatio-temporally detects potential foreground regions at multiple scales to generate action tubelets. We propose a novel Patch-Dice loss to handle large variations in actor size. Our online processing of videos at a clip level drastically reduces the computation time in detecting activities. The detected tubelets are assigned activity class scores by the classification network and merged together using our proposed Tubelet-Merge Action-Split (TMAS) algorithm to form the final action detections. The TMAS algorithm efficiently connects the tubelets in an online fashion to generate action detections which are robust against varying length activities. We perform our experiments on the VIRAT and MEVA (Multiview Extended Video with Activities) datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of speed (~100 fps) and performance with state-of-the-art results. The code and models will be made publicly available.