Temporal Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos from Fine to Coarse Granularity

Temporal action detection in long, untrimmed videos is an important yet challenging task that requires not only recognizing the categories of actions in videos, but also localizing the start and end times of each action. Recent years, artificial neural networks, such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) improve the performance significantly in various computer vision tasks, including action detection. In this paper, we make the most of different granular classifiers and propose to detect action from fine to coarse granularity, which is also in line with the people’s detection habits. Our action detection method is built in the ‘proposal then classification’ framework. We employ several neural network architectures as deep information extractor and segment-level (fine granular) and window-level (coarse granular) classifiers. Each of the proposal and classification steps is executed from the segment to window level. The experimental results show that our method not only achieves detection performance that is comparable to that of state-of-the-art methods, but also has a relatively balanced performance for different action categories.