Oops! Predicting Unintentional Action in Video

Dave Epstein, Boyuan Chen, Carl Vondrick; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 919-929

From just a short glance at a video, we can often tell whether a person's action is intentional or not. Can we train a model to recognize this? We introduce a dataset of in-the-wild videos of unintentional action, as well as a suite of tasks for recognizing, localizing, and anticipating its onset. We train a supervised neural network as a baseline and analyze its performance compared to human consistency on the tasks. We also investigate self-supervised representations that leverage natural signals in our dataset, and show the effectiveness of an approach that uses the intrinsic speed of video to perform competitively with highly-supervised pretraining. However, a significant gap between machine and human performance remains.