UAV-Human: A Large Benchmark for Human Behavior Understanding With Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Tianjiao Li, Jun Liu, Wei Zhang, Yun Ni, Wenqian Wang, Zhiheng Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 16266-16275

Human behavior understanding with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is of great significance for a wide range of applications, which simultaneously brings an urgent demand of large, challenging, and comprehensive benchmarks for the development and evaluation of UAV-based models. However, existing benchmarks have limitations in terms of the amount of captured data, types of data modalities, categories of provided tasks, and diversities of subjects and environments. Here we propose a new benchmark - UAV-Human - for human behavior understanding with UAVs, which contains 67,428 multi-modal video sequences and 119 subjects for action recognition, 22,476 frames for pose estimation, 41,290 frames and 1,144 identities for person re-identification, and 22,263 frames for attribute recognition. Our dataset was collected by a flying UAV in multiple urban and rural districts in both daytime and nighttime over three months, hence covering extensive diversities w.r.t subjects, backgrounds, illuminations, weathers, occlusions, camera motions, and UAV flying attitudes. Such a comprehensive and challenging benchmark shall be able to promote the research of UAV-based human behavior understanding, including action recognition, pose estimation, re-identification, and attribute recognition. Furthermore, we propose a fisheye-based action recognition method that mitigates the distortions in fisheye videos via learning unbounded transformations guided by flat RGB videos. Experiments show the efficacy of our method on the UAV-Human dataset.