Jihwan Kim

Jihwan Kim, Miso Lee, Jae-Pil Heo

Temporal action detection (TAD) is challenging, yet fundamental for real-world video applications. Recently, DETR-based models for TAD have been prevailing thanks to their unique benefits. However, transformers demand a huge dataset, and unfortunately data scarcity in TAD causes a severe degeneration. In this paper, we identify two crucial problems from data scarcity: attention collapse and imbalanced performance. To this end, we propose a new pre-training strategy, Long-Term Pre-training (LTP), tailored for transformers. LTP has two main components: 1) class-wise synthesis, 2) long-term pretext tasks. Firstly, we synthesize long-form video features by merging video snippets of a target class and non-target classes. They are analogous to untrimmed data used in TAD, despite being created from trimmed data. In addition, we devise two types of long-term pretext tasks to learn long-term dependency. They impose long-term conditions such as finding second-to-fourth or short-duration actions. Our extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performances in DETR-based methods on ActivityNet-v1.3 and THUMOS14 by a large margin. Moreover, we demonstrate that LTP significantly relieves the data scarcity issues in TAD.

Jihwan Kim, Jaehyun Choi, Yerim Jeon et al.

Temporal action detection (TAD) is challenging, yet fundamental for real-world video applications. Large temporal scale variation of actions is one of the most primary difficulties in TAD. Naturally, multi-scale features have potential in localizing actions of diverse lengths as widely used in object detection. Nevertheless, unlike objects in images, actions have more ambiguity in their boundaries. That is, small neighboring objects are not considered as a large one while short adjoining actions can be misunderstood as a long one. In the coarse-to-fine feature pyramid via pooling, these vague action boundaries can fade out, which we call 'vanishing boundary problem'. To this end, we propose Boundary-Recovering Network (BRN) to address the vanishing boundary problem. BRN constructs scale-time features by introducing a new axis called scale dimension by interpolating multi-scale features to the same temporal length. On top of scale-time features, scale-time blocks learn to exchange features across scale levels, which can effectively settle down the issue. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the two challenging benchmarks, ActivityNet-v1.3 and THUMOS14, with remarkably reduced degree of the vanishing boundary problem.