Deep Analysis of CNN-Based Spatio-Temporal Representations for Action Recognition

Chun-Fu Richard Chen, Rameswar Panda, Kandan Ramakrishnan, Rogerio Feris, John Cohn, Aude Oliva, Quanfu Fan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 6165-6175

In recent years, a number of approaches based on 2D or 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) have emerged for video action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art results on several large-scale benchmark datasets. In this paper, we carry out in-depth comparative analysis to better understand the differences between these approaches and the progress made by them. To this end, we develop an unified framework for both 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN action models, which enables us to remove bells and whistles and provides a common ground for fair comparison. We then conduct an effort towards a large-scale analysis involving over 300 action recognition models. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that a) a significant leap is made in efficiency for action recognition, but not in accuracy; b) 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN models behave similarly in terms of spatio-temporal representation abilities and transferability. Our codes are available at https://github.com/IBM/action-recognition-pytorch.