TinyVIRAT: Low-resolution Video Action Recognition
This addresses the challenge of action recognition in real-world surveillance where activities occur at low resolutions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing generative and attention techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of recognizing tiny actions in low-resolution surveillance videos by introducing the TinyVIRAT benchmark dataset and a novel method using progressive generative enhancement and weakly trained attention, achieving state-of-the-art results on synthetic datasets and significant improvements over baselines.
The existing research in action recognition is mostly focused on high-quality videos where the action is distinctly visible. In real-world surveillance environments, the actions in videos are captured at a wide range of resolutions. Most activities occur at a distance with a small resolution and recognizing such activities is a challenging problem. In this work, we focus on recognizing tiny actions in videos. We introduce a benchmark dataset, TinyVIRAT, which contains natural low-resolution activities. The actions in TinyVIRAT videos have multiple labels and they are extracted from surveillance videos which makes them realistic and more challenging. We propose a novel method for recognizing tiny actions in videos which utilizes a progressive generative approach to improve the quality of low-resolution actions. The proposed method also consists of a weakly trained attention mechanism which helps in focusing on the activity regions in the video. We perform extensive experiments to benchmark the proposed TinyVIRAT dataset and observe that the proposed method significantly improves the action recognition performance over baselines. We also evaluate the proposed approach on synthetically resized action recognition datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results when compared with existing methods. The dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/UgurDemir/Tiny-VIRAT.