A Multi-Stream Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Network for Fine-Grained Action Detection

Bharat Singh, Tim K. Marks, Michael Jones, Oncel Tuzel, Ming Shao; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 1961-1970

We present a multi-stream bi-directional recurrent neural network for fine-grained action detection. Recently, two-stream convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on stacked optical flow and image frames have been successful for action recognition in videos. Our system uses a tracking algorithm to locate a bounding box around the person, which provides a frame of reference for appearance and motion and also suppresses background noise that is not within the bounding box. We train two additional streams on motion and appearance cropped to the tracked bounding box, along with full-frame streams. Our motion streams use pixel trajectories of a frame as raw features, in which the displacement values corresponding to a moving scene point are at the same spatial position across several frames. To model long-term temporal dynamics within and between actions, the multi-stream CNN is followed by a bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layer. We show that our bi-directional LSTM network utilizes about 8 seconds of the video sequence to predict an action label. We test on two action detection datasets: the MPII Cooking 2 Dataset, and a new MERL Shopping Dataset that we introduce and make available to the community with this paper. The results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art action detection methods on both datasets.