Completeness Modeling and Context Separation for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Daochang Liu, Tingting Jiang, Yizhou Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 1298-1307

Temporal action localization is crucial for understanding untrimmed videos. In this work, we first identify two underexplored problems posed by the weak supervision for temporal action localization, namely action completeness modeling and action-context separation. Then by presenting a novel network architecture and its training strategy, the two problems are explicitly looked into. Specifically, to model the completeness of actions, we propose a multi-branch neural network in which branches are enforced to discover distinctive action parts. Complete actions can be therefore localized by fusing activations from different branches. And to separate action instances from their surrounding context, we generate hard negative data for training using the prior that motionless video clips are unlikely to be actions. Experiments performed on datasets THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the average mAP on ActivityNet v1.2 is significantly improved from 18.0% to 22.4%. Our code will be released soon.