BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Tianwei Lin, Xiao Liu, Xin Li, Errui Ding, Shilei Wen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 3889-3898

Abstract


Temporal action proposal generation is an challenging and promising task which aims to locate temporal regions in real-world videos where action or event may occur. Current bottom-up proposal generation methods can generate proposals with precise boundary, but cannot efficiently generate adequately reliable confidence scores for retrieving proposals. To address these difficulties, we introduce the Boundary-Matching (BM) mechanism to evaluate confidence scores of densely distributed proposals, which denote a proposal as a matching pair of starting and ending boundaries and combine all densely distributed BM pairs into the BM confidence map. Based on BM mechanism, we propose an effective, efficient and end-to-end proposal generation method, named Boundary-Matching Network (BMN), which generates proposals with precise temporal boundaries as well as reliable confidence scores simultaneously. The two-branches of BMN are jointly trained in an unified framework. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3, where BMN shows significant performance improvement with remarkable efficiency and generalizability. Further, combining with existing action classifier, BMN can achieve state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Lin_2019_ICCV,
author = {Lin, Tianwei and Liu, Xiao and Li, Xin and Ding, Errui and Wen, Shilei},
title = {BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}