Learning Salient Boundary Feature for Anchor-free Temporal Action Localization

Chuming Lin, Chengming Xu, Donghao Luo, Yabiao Wang, Ying Tai, Chengjie Wang, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Yanwei Fu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 3320-3329

Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging task in video understanding. Typically, such a task aims at inferring both the action category and localization of the start and end frame for each action instance in a long, untrimmed video. While most current models achieve good results by using pre-defined anchors and numerous actionness, such methods could be bothered with both large number of outputs and heavy tuning of locations and sizes corresponding to different anchors. Instead, anchor-free methods is lighter, getting rid of redundant hyper-parameters, but gains few attention. In this paper, we propose the first purely anchor-free temporal localization method, which is both efficient and effective. Our model includes (i) an end-to-end trainable basic predictor, (ii) a saliency-based refinement module to gather more valuable boundary features for each proposal with a novel boundary pooling, and (iii) several consistency constraints to make sure our model can find the accurate boundary given arbitrary proposals. Extensive experiments show that our method beats all anchor-based and actionness-guided methods with a remarkable margin on THUMOS14, achieving state-of-the-art results, and comparable ones on ActivityNet v1.3. Our code will be made available upon publication.