Time-Conditioned Action Anticipation in One Shot

Qiuhong Ke, Mario Fritz, Bernt Schiele; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 9925-9934

The goal of human action anticipation is to predict future actions. Ideally, in real-world applications such as video surveillance and self-driving systems, future actions should not only be predicted with high accuracy but also at arbitrary and variable time-horizons ranging from short- to long-term predictions. Current work mostly focuses on predicting the next action and thus long-term prediction is achieved by recursive prediction of each next action, which is both inefficient and accumulates errors. In this paper, we propose a novel time-conditioned method for efficient and effective long-term action anticipation. There are two key ingredients to our approach. First, by explicitly conditioning our anticipation network on time allows to efficiently anticipate also long-term actions. And second, we propose an attended temporal feature and a time-conditioned skip connection to extract relevant and useful information from observations for effective anticipation. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale Epic-Kitchen and the 50Salads Datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of anticipating future actions at both short-term and long-term, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.