HACS: Human Action Clips and Segments Dataset for Recognition and Temporal Localization

Hang Zhao, Antonio Torralba, Lorenzo Torresani, Zhicheng Yan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 8668-8678

This paper presents a new large-scale dataset for recognition and temporal localization of human actions collected from Web videos. We refer to it as HACS (Human Action Clips and Segments). We leverage consensus and disagreement among visual classifiers to automatically mine candidate short clips from unlabeled videos, which are subsequently validated by human annotators. The resulting dataset is dubbed HACS Clips. Through a separate process we also collect annotations defining action segment boundaries. This resulting dataset is called HACS Segments. Overall, HACS Clips consists of 1.5M annotated clips sampled from 504K untrimmed videos, and HACS Segments contains 139K action segments densely annotated in 50K untrimmed videos spanning 200 action categories. HACS Clips contains more labeled examples than any existing video benchmark. This renders our dataset both a large-scale action recognition benchmark and an excellent source for spatiotemporal feature learning. In our transfer learning experiments on three target datasets, HACS Clips outperforms Kinetics-600, Moments-In-Time and Sports1M as a pretraining source. On HACS Segments, we evaluate state-of-the-art methods of action proposal generation and action localization, and highlight the new challenges posed by our dense temporal annotations.