Long-term Behaviour Recognition in Videos with Actor-focused Region
Attention
Luca Ballan
1,2
, Ombretta Strafforello
2,3
and Klamer Schutte
2
1
Department of Math, University of Padova, Italy
2
Intelligent Imaging, TNO, Oude Waalsdorperweg 63, The Hague, The Netherlands
3
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Keywords:
Action Recognition, Region Attention, 3D Convolutional Neural Networks, Video Classification.
Abstract:
Long-Term activities involve humans performing complex, minutes-long actions. Differently than in tradi-
tional action recognition, complex activities are normally composed of a set of sub-actions, that can appear in
different order, duration, and quantity. These aspects introduce a large intra-class variability, that can be hard
to model. Our approach aims to adaptively capture and learn the importance of spatial and temporal video re-
gions for minutes-long activity classification. Inspired by previous work on Region Attention, our architecture
embeds the spatio-temporal features from multiple video regions into a compact fixed-length representation.
These features are extracted with a 3D convolutional backbone specially fine-tuned. Additionally, driven by
the prior assumption that the most discriminative locations in the videos are centered around the human that
is carrying out the activity, we introduce an Actor Focus mechanism to enhance the feature extraction both in
training and inference phase. Our experiments show that the Multi-Regional fine-tuned 3D-CNN, topped with
Actor Focus and Region Attention, largely improves the performance of baseline 3D architectures, achieving
state-of-the-art results on Breakfast, a well known long-term activity recognition benchmark.
1 INTRODUCTION
Long-term activity recognition is getting increasing
attention in the Computer Vision community as it
allows for important applications related to video
surveillance and sport video analysis. However, this
task is intrinsically complex because of the long dura-
tion of the videos, the variability in the activities com-
position and the visual complexity of video frames
from real world scenarios. Inspired by previous work
on Region Attention (Yang et al., 2017), we intro-
duce a model that can adaptively select and focus on
the video regions that are most discriminative for the
complex activity classification.
Our method is driven by two assumptions. Firstly,
not all the locations and the moments in the videos
are equally important. The activity ”preparing cereal
bowl”, for example, has a precise location in the video
frames. Other locations belong to the background,
namely regions where the activity does not happen.
Background locations might show ”distracting” ele-
ments that might induce to misclassify the activity.
Similarly, a correct classification of a cooking activity
might be possible just by looking at the last seconds of
the videos, that are likely to show the ready dish. On
the contrary, some less informative moments might
occur elsewhere, for instance when the cook is look-
ing for the ingredients. Following this assumption, we
introduce a Region Attention module, that can explic-
itly choose among multiple spatial and temporal input
regions. This setting acts as a natural data augmenta-
tion strategy, and allows to retain only the information
that is relevant for the classification.
The second assumption is that the most discrimi-
native spatial regions in the videos are the ones placed
around the actor that is accomplishing the activity.
For example, for cooking activities, the ingredients
and the utensils that are characteristic of the actions,
are those that the cook interacts with. Therefore, fo-
cusing on the cook should give sufficient information
to understand what dish is being made. Hence, we
introduce an Actor Focus mechanism that allows the
model to explicitly center the attention on the actor.
Due to the large intra-class variability, modelling
long-term activities can be difficult. The recent so-
lutions in the literature involve 3D-CNNs as effec-
tive spatio-temporal feature extractors (Carreira and
Zisserman, 2017), combined with additional mod-
362
Ballan, L., Strafforello, O. and Schutte, K.
Long-term Behaviour Recognition in Videos with Actor-focused Region Attention.
DOI: 10.5220/0010215803620369
In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 5: VISAPP, pages
362-369
ISBN: 978-989-758-488-6
Copyright
c
2021 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
ules that further process the features in the temporal
dimension, including temporal convolution (Hussein
et al., 2019a) and self-attention (Hussein et al., 2019b;
Hussein et al., 2020a; Wang et al., 2018). Even
though these works reached competitive results in
common long-term activities benchmarks, we argue
that the performance of these models is heavily influ-
enced by the quality of the 3D-CNNs backbone train-
ing. Despite their potential, 3D-CNN architectures
are characterized by the downside of having a large
amount of parameters that makes the learning process
extremely data hungry. Since the datasets for long-
term activities are limited in size (Kuehne et al., 2014;
Sigurdsson et al., 2016; Yeung et al., 2018) learn-
ing general video representations with these models
without overfitting on the training set is unfeasible.
That is why our approach based on multiple regions
is crucial to reach better generalization. We show that
the combination of an optimal backbone fine-tuning,
augmented with the multiple regions, with the Re-
gion Attention method and the Actor Focus mecha-
nism achieves state-of-the-art results on the Breakfast
Actions Dataset benchmark (Kuehne et al., 2014).
2 RELATED WORK
Although a wide range of solutions for short-range
action recognition have been proposed (Carreira and
Zisserman, 2017; Kalfaoglu et al., 2020; Qiu et al.,
2019), these are not necessarily transferable to long-
term activity recognition, as the two data types are
fundamentally different. Short actions (or unit-
actions), such as ”cutting” or ”pouring” are limited
in duration and consist of a single, possibly periodic,
movement. Because of this, they are easily recogniz-
able by looking at a small number of frames, some-
times even one (Schindler and Gool, 2008). On the
contrary, long-term activities are composed by a col-
lection of unit-actions, where some of them might be
shared among different classes. For example, the ac-
tion ”pouring” belongs both to the classes ”making
tea” and ”making coffee”. Because of this, it is not
possible to classify a complex activity by looking at a
specific moment, but the whole time span should be
considered. Therefore, more sophisticated architec-
tures are required.
2.1 Long-term Modelling
The majority of the recently proposed works on long-
term modelling enhance the exploitation of the tem-
poral dimension. Timeception (Hussein et al., 2019a),
for example, achieves this with multi-scale temporal
convolutions which learn flexibly long-term temporal
dependencies. Similarly, (Varol et al., 2017) consider
different temporal extents of video representations at
the cost of decreased spatial resolution. (Wu et al.,
2019a) propose a long-term feature bank of informa-
tion extracted over the entire span of videos as context
information in support to 3D-CNNs. (Burghouts and
Schutte, 2013) rely on STIP (Spatio-Temporal Inter-
est Points) features weighted by their spatio-temporal
probability. Another example of temporal reasoning
is provided by the TRN (Temporal Relation Network)
(Zhou et al., 2018), that learns dependencies be-
tween video frames, at both short-term and long-term
timescales. Conditional Gating adopted in TimeGate
(Hussein et al., 2020b) enables a differentiable sam-
pling of video segments, to discard redundant infor-
mation and achieve computational efficiency. Ac-
cording to another recent thread, supported in Video-
Graph (Hussein et al., 2019b) and (Wang and Gupta,
2018), a thorough representation of complex activities
can be achieved by explicitly modelling the human-
object and object-object interactions across time. The
VideoGraph method learns this type of information
through a fixed set of latent concepts depicting the
activity evolution, whereas (Herzig et al., 2019) ad-
dress directly the object-object interactions, embed-
ding them in a graph structure.
Among the most performing work that utilizes the
Breakfast dataset, (Hussein et al., 2020a) propose a
new kind of convolutional operation which is invari-
ant to the temporal permutations within a local win-
dow. Their proposed model is better suited to han-
dling the weak temporal structure and variable order
of the unit-actions that compose the long-term activi-
ties. On the other hand, ActionVlad (Girdhar et al.,
2017) develops a system that pools jointly across
spatio-temporal features provided by a two-stream
network. Finally, Non-local Nets (Wang et al., 2018)
provide a building block for many deep architectures:
computing the response at a position as a weighted
sum of the features at all positions, they capture long-
term dependencies in a way that is not feasible with
standard convolutional or recurrent operations.
2.2 Region Attention
The best attempt of weighted averaging approach that
could go under the name of Region Attention, to the
best of our knowledge, has been done by (Yang et al.,
2017), who believe that a good pooling or aggrega-
tion strategy should adaptively weigh and combine
the information across all parts of multimedia content.
Their Neural Aggregation Networks (NAN) served
as a general framework for learning content-adaptive
Long-term Behaviour Recognition in Videos with Actor-focused Region Attention
363
pooling, emphasizing or suppressing input elements
via weighted averaging. The concept of Regional At-
tention as developed in Section 3 is a direct evolution
of what has been applied on Face Expression Recog-
nition in (Wang et al., 2020). The authors built a so-
called Region Attention Network (RAN), capable of
extracting features from several spatial regions of the
original images, and combining them from a weighted
perspective. This method is more robust to occlusion
and can better attend to the specific face parts that
characterize the human expressions.
3 METHOD
In our approach, we use the Inflated 3D ConvNet
(I3D) (Carreira and Zisserman, 2017), optimally fine-
tuned for the classification task at hand, as a feature
extractor for multiple video regions and timesteps.
These representations are fed to a novel attention
module, that summarizes them into a compact feature
vector. We experiment with two variants of the mod-
ule: (spatial) Region Attention (RA) and Temporal
Attention (TA), used both individually and jointly.
3.1 I3D and Region Attention
The Region Attention module produces fixed-length
representations that highlight the most informative re-
gions received as input. To achieve this, frames are
partitioned with an overlapping regular N × N grid,
with N = 3, to extract crops. The attention mecha-
nism is built on top of I3D, which processes the raw
videos and outputs respective feature representations.
The full model can be trained in two steps. To provide
coherent features, I3D is fine-tuned on the multiple
video regions that will be considered by the attention
module. Each video is handled in a fixed mode: i. the
video frames are converted to RGB and normalized
within the range [-1.0, 1.0]; ii. T = 64 timesteps,
of 8 consecutive frames each, are uniformly selected
from the full clip; iii. through a grid-like scheme, R
squared spatial regions are cropped from the fixed-
length sample, and resized to I3D input’s spatial size
224 × 224. The resulting region crops are partially
overlapped, since the cropping portion is 5/8 of a
frame. R = 10 because the full frame is considered
together with the 9 grid regions to preserve global in-
formation. R = 11 when Actor Focus is applied.
During each I3D training epoch, for each video in the
training and validation splits one of the spatial regions
is randomly selected. First, this provides data aug-
mentation. Second, I3D extracts features according
to the region given as input, instead of always seeing
a full frame, thus learning the importance of details in
different locations and scale. This behaviour is con-
sistent with the following Region Attention module,
that learns to weight the region features, thus making
I3D a suitable backbone. Within the Region Atten-
tion module a weight in [0.0, 1.0] is assigned to each
region feature, through a shared fully-connected layer
+ Sigmoid activation. The values are used to compute
a weighted average of the features, unweighted on the
temporal dimension, which is fed into a classification
layer. The full process is shown in Figure 1.
3.2 Temporal Attention
A similar scoring mechanism can be applied to the
timesteps. The idea of using attention in the tempo-
ral dimension derives, for example, from the fact that
initial frames generally have a relatively lower rele-
vance compared to the last frames, which show the
result of the activity. Also, in some timesteps the ac-
tivity does not happen at all. However, extended ab-
lation studies showed that Temporal Attention loses
its effectiveness when I3D is fine-tuned, as it appears
that the I3D model collects already sufficient infor-
mation from the sequence of the timesteps. Finally,
assuming independence between region importance
and timesteps importance, we explored the integra-
tion of Region Attention and Temporal Attention by
using concatenation, as shown in Figure 3.
3.3 Actor-Focus
A further improvement is driven by the consideration
that in a high number of cases a single person is per-
forming the activity, generally in a static spatial region
of the video. Person detection finds its utility here for
the action classification task, due to the following: i.
detecting the people in the scene allows the focus to
be on the subject performing the activity and on the
closest involved entities; ii. I3D fine-tuning can be
carried out exploiting spatial crops centered on the ac-
tor, additionally boosting the ability of the framework
to prioritize and highlight the activity globe against
clutter and irrelevant background.
For each video, FacebookAI’s Detectron2 (Wu
et al., 2019b) is used to get the person bounding box
from each frame. As shown in Figure 2, the coordi-
nates are averaged, images are cropped accordingly
and then resized. Specifically, a square with the same
center of the average bounding box and dimensions
equal to the biggest between height and width of the
bounding box is taken. Since the person box has al-
most always a higher value for the height than for the
width, this means that despite the process of having
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364
Figure 1: The Region Attention module. From every sample in the dataset a 3 x 3 grid is used, and the extracted crops are
placed next to the full frames for I3D feature extraction. A fully-connected (FC) layer and a Sigmoid function attribute to
each region a score, through which the features are averaged in a weighted manner and feed the final classification layer.
Figure 2: The Actor-Focused crop selection through person detection in video frames. Bounding box coordinates for the
actor detected in each frame are averaged and used to crop the original video around the person performing the activity. The
selected region is added to the others to feed the Region Attention module.
Figure 3: Concatenation of regional and temporal features
of a video for classification. The two feature vectors com-
puted separately from the two modules are concatenated
along the channels and feed the final classification layer.
a fixed averaged bounding box across the video, the
actor is likely not to be cut out of the scene when
performing small movements. These actor-centered
videos are fed to I3D and Region Attention together
with the other regions coming from the fixed-grid se-
lection.
4 EXPERIMENTS
4.1 Dataset
The Breakfast Actions Dataset (Kuehne et al., 2014),
on which we achieve state-of-the-art results, com-
prises 10 classes of long-term activities performed by
52 actors. Videos of the first 44 actors are used for
training, the remaining for testing. We keep 5 actors
from the training split for validation. This gives, re-
spectively, 1322, 411 and 256 videos. The up-to-10-
minutes long videos (2 minutes on average) are han-
dled to be of fixed length and size as explained in Sec-
tion 3. To obtain equal width and height the horizontal
central crop of each original frame is resized and con-
sidered as the selected frame. The resulting frames
feed both the grid-like region selection and the person
detection mechanism.
4.2 Actor-Focused I3D + RA
The full Actor-Focused I3D + RA model, unless oth-
erwise specified, considers 11 regions in total. These
include the full frame, kept in order to preserve infor-
mation about the global spatial context from which
the regions are extracted, and the actor-centered re-
gion. The original I3D implementation remains un-
changed except for the very last layer, which is newly
initialized considering a 10-fold output due to the
number of Breakfast classes. This allows for the uti-
Long-term Behaviour Recognition in Videos with Actor-focused Region Attention
365
Figure 4: I3D + RA architecture. The fine-tuned section (last 3 Inception blocks), together with the RA module and the
classification layer, composes the trainable part of the framework, highlighted in yellow. Note that the 1x1x1 Convolution,
used as a fully-connected layer in the original I3D architecture, is not used when extracting the features from fine-tuned I3D.
lization of pre-trained I3D checkpoints obtained from
Kinetics 400 (Carreira and Zisserman, 2017).
Experiments where run on Nvidia GeForce GTX
1080 and Tesla V100 GPUs. Due to the large size of
the input and the huge number of parameters of I3D
(tens of millions), the devices capacity enabled a max-
imum batch size of 4 for the backbone fine-tuning.
In addition, to make the computation feasible, we re-
strict the fine-tuning only to the the last three Incep-
tion blocks and freeze the bottom layers. The features
processed by I3D are extracted from the 2× 7× 7 Avg-
Pool layer, and feed the conclusive RA step. Again,
RA calculates importance scores for each input region
and uses them in a weighted average, to aggregate the
multi-regional input in a compact representation. The
output is a 1024-dimensional vector (2048 in the Re-
gion + Temporal Attention setting) and is used for the
final classification step. The full architecture, detailed
on input and output shapes, is shown in Figure 4.
The developed framework is implemented using
PyTorch and trained on single GPU for 100 epochs,
using Adam optimizer with learning rate 10
-3
, ε value
10
-8
, weight decay coefficient 10
-5
, and CrossEntropy
loss function calculated on the 10-fold logits of the
last fully-connected layer. Results are calculated on
the test set, while our best models are chosen based on
the best validation accuracy obtained in 100 epochs.
4.3 Ablation Studies
4.3.1 Temporal Dimension
First, we show that the amount of timesteps consid-
ered has a remarkable impact on classification. Con-
sequently, we confute the assumption that only a few
specific moments in time are sufficient for the classi-
fication of complex activities. Previous work (Hus-
sein et al., 2019b) shows that a uniform selection
works generally better than sampling timesteps ran-
domly. Therefore, we keep this setup, and vary in-
stead the quantity of input timesteps, from 4 to 128.
Each timestep is composed of 8 consecutive frames.
Table 1: Full framework results varying the timestep num-
ber. Best accuracy on the test set has been reached with T =
64.
T
4 16 64 128
Acc. % 68.13 83.94 89.84 86.13
The results, shown in Table 1, indicate that, for an ac-
curate classification, a sufficiently but not exceedingly
high number of timesteps from the videos should be
considered. This finding is coherent with the complex
and variable nature of long-term activities, that are
characterized by the presence of several unit-actions.
The unit-actions should be represented by the selected
video timesteps. Also, sampling a large amount of
timesteps helps reduce the noise in input signals, lead-
ing to a more robust modelling of the underlying fea-
tures. However, the results show that an excessively
long input might not be optimal. In fact, the high-
est accuracy obtained with our full model (89.84%) is
achieved with T = 64, while the accuracy drops when
using 128 timesteps. This unexpected outcome can be
motivated by considering that many videos in Break-
fast are shorter than 128× 8 frames = 1024 frames. In
this short videos, the 128 selected segments signifi-
cantly overlap, thus introducing high redundancy and
altering the temporal dynamics.
Following the analysis on the number of video
timesteps, we demonstrate that the overall temporal
order of the timesteps carries valuable information.
First, we shuffle the timesteps during the I3D fine-
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366
Table 2: Comparison between frame filtering methods on validation and test sets. Despite a lower accuracy in validation,
selecting uniformly 64 timesteps from each video gives better results on the test set. Here, I3D is fine-tuned according to the
Multi-Regional with Actor-Focus setting.
I3D I3D + RA
val. acc. % test acc. % val. acc. % test acc. %
512 equally spaced frames 83.59 80.05 87.89 86.86
T = 64 (8 frames each) 82.03 82.97 87.50 89.84
tuning. As convolution is not a permutation invariant
operator, the shuffling has a negative impact on the
backbone, and consequently on the Region Attention.
With this setup, we obtain an accuracy of 79.81%. We
report the results in Table 3, under ”Sh. timesteps”.
Second, we investigate two methods for the fea-
ture extraction, that are allowed by the peculiar ar-
chitecture of I3D. Specifically, thanks to the cascad-
ing layers containing max pooling, I3D shrinks the
temporal dimension of the input of a factor. As each
timestep is composed of 8 consecutive frames, the
output feature representation has the same length as
the number of timesteps. Because of this, it is possible
to extract the features one timestep at a time (One-at-
a-time) and concatenate the results on the time dimen-
sion dimension, or to feed in input all the segments to-
gether (One-shot fashion), without changing the out-
put size. The difference between the two settings is
given by the fact that in the One-at-a-time case, the
modelling of one specific timestep is not affected by
the neighbouring timesteps. On the other hand, in the
One-shot way the full I3D temporal receptive field is
exploited, combining local with global information.
Experiments show that the One-shot setting brings
a noticeable improvement over One-at-a-time fea-
tures. Intuitively, considering the context in which
timesteps are placed, helps achieve a better feature
representation. The results from these two setting,
respectively, are 89.84% versus 83.7%, as shown in
Table 3.
The variability in length of Breakfast videos, also
within the same class, makes it challenging to rep-
resent all the videos fairly in a fixed-length vector.
To this extent, short videos are well represented by
T = 64 timesteps, but this amount of timesteps might
not be enough to cover all the unit-actions in longer
videos. Other than the uniform and random 8-frame
timestep selection evaluated in previous work (Hus-
sein et al., 2019b), we experiment with 512 equally
spaced frames (One-shot + 512 f.) in Table 3. De-
spite achieving slightly better performance in valida-
tion (Table 2), the One-shot + 512 f. setup results
in lower accuracy on the test set. This is probably
due to the fact that sampling equidistant frames in-
troduces variable frame frequency in the I3D input.
Opposite to this, when sampling timesteps instead of
frames, the frequency within each timestep is fixed, as
all the videos have the same frame rate. The variable
frame frequency alters the motion dynamics modeled
by I3D, making the learning process harder.
The last experiment with regards to the temporal
dimension is about Temporal Attention, used as an al-
ternative of spatial Region Attention or in conjunction
with it. As shown in Table 3, applying TA and TRA
(combined Temporal-Region Attention, as described
in Section 3) on top of the convolutional backbone
does not result in interesting improvements. Appar-
ently, I3D itself learns sufficiently strong fine-grained
and long-term temporal patterns in the fine-tuning
phase, thus making Temporal Attention superfluous.
On the other side, it is interesting to note that without
fine-tuning I3D, the best performances are given by
the combination of Temporal and Region Attention.
All the above results are summarised in Table 3.
Table 3: Ablation results considering the temporal axis. Ta-
ble sections from the top: i. Region Attention (RA), Tem-
poral Attention (TA), Temporal-Region Attention (TRA) on
top of not fine-tuned I3D; ii. RA/TA/TRA on top of fine-
tuned I3D; iii. same of ii. with different input settings.
I3D setting T Acc. Top Acc.
Not fine-tuned 64 58.88
TA 65.94
RA 69.59
TRA 71.53
One-shot 64 82.97
TA 84.67
RA 89.84
TRA 86.62
Sh. timesteps 64 73.97 RA 79.81
One-at-a-time 64 77.62 RA 83.70
One-shot 512 f. 80.05 RA 86.86
4.3.2 Spatial Dimension
Having discussed the experiments on the temporal
axis, we now analyse the spatial dimension. In the fol-
lowing experiments we compare our full model with
two model variations: i. a simple Region Mean model
processes 11 video regions and computes a compact
representation by taking the arithmetic mean of the
features, neglecting the variable importance of the
video regions; ii. the multi-regional fine-tuning strat-
egy for I3D is replaced with a single region, that cor-
responds to the person-centered crop in each training
video. To this end, we exploit the Actor-Focus mech-
anism described in Section 3.
Long-term Behaviour Recognition in Videos with Actor-focused Region Attention
367
Figure 5: Visualization of the different scores that the Region Attention module attributes to the video regions. The four
regions that are visualized correspond, respectively, to the top-3 and last crops, for 2 samples of the activity ”preparing
coffee”. The coloured square in each frame represents the Actor-Focus region. The RA module sets higher scores for the
person-centered and grid-central crops.
The first setting aims to show the improvements
brought by RA scoring mechanism. Without the
weighted average, the drop in accuracy is around
1.76%, as shown in Table 4 (Region Mean versus RA).
Secondly, the comparison with the one region I3D
fine-tuning proves the benefit of the multi-regional
setup. In fact, training the network with multiple re-
gion crops from the same videos acts as a convenient
data augmentation strategy. In addition, this learn-
ing process produces spatio-temporal features that are
more representative of what the following Region At-
tention module expects as input. When fine-tuning
the backbone only with the Actor-Focus crop, the ac-
curacy is 86.62%, with a drop of 3.22% compared to
the Multi-Regional setup, as shown in Table 4.
Figure 5 provides a visualization of the variable
importance scores attributed to different video regions
through the attention mechanism. According to the
prior assumption that the regions of interest for ac-
tivity recognition revolve around the actor perform-
ing the action, RA assigns the highest scores to the
person-centered and central grid crops. On the con-
trary, background regions such as lower and ”corner”
crops score weights that are close to zero.
Finally, we measure the benefit brought by the
Actor-Focus mechanism. The model is trained with
and without the Actor-Focus crop. The inclusion of
the latter region appears to have a huge impact in the
action recognition performance, that increases from
86.62% (MR I3D setting in Table 4) to the final result
of 89.84%.
4.3.3 I3D Fine-Tuning
The extensive experimental comparison between cur-
rent state-of-the-art methods, is partially limited by
Table 4: Ablation results considering the spatial axis. Table
sections from the top: i. different I3D fine-tuning settings
and Region Attention (RA); ii. best I3D model with Region
Mean or RA; iii. former state-of-the-art results on Break-
fast. Note: ”MR I3D” indicates Multi-Regional fine-tuning
on 10 regions (no person-centered region), while ”AF I3D”
indicates fine-tuning only on person-centered region. R
specifies the number of regions. The RA setting is intended
to be placed on top of the respective I3D setting.
Backbone R Acc. RA setting Acc.
I3D not f.t. 1 58.88 RA 72.02
I3D 1 80.05 RA 83.45
MR I3D 10 81.02 RA 86.62
AF I3D 1 81.75 RA 86.62
Region mean 88.08
AF MR I3D 11 82.97
RA 89.84
ActionVlad 82.67
Nonlocal 83.79
Timeception 86.93
I3D full f.t. 1 80.64
PIC 89.84
the lack of hardware resources. In all the above ex-
periments, I3D is fine-tuned only in the last three con-
volutional layers and only one region at a time is fed
for each video. We leave the end-to-end training of
the full Multi-Regional I3D + RA for future work.
However, the classification accuracies achieved when
fine-tuning the last three layers of I3D or the full
model are nearly equal. Respectively, these corre-
spond to 80.05% and 80.64% (Hussein et al., 2020a).
As the difference is not significant, we do not expect
substantial improvements with a full fine-tuning.
5 CONCLUSIONS
We introduce Multi-Regional I3D fine-tuning with
Actor-Focused Region Attention, a neural framework
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368
dedicated to the spatio-temporal modelling of long-
term activities in videos. We show that the model
can learn long-term dependencies across timesteps,
resulting in robust representations, and that it is not
possible to accurately classify long activities from a
few timesteps only. We give insights on the amount
of timesteps, their order and the importance of the
frame frequency. Next, a Region Attention module
supports spatio-temporal data to adaptively learn the
importance of the spatial cues in different video re-
gions, which also allow the backbone to learn rich
feature representations. Lastly, an Actor-Focus mech-
anism drives the attention on the truly discriminative
video regions where the actor is performing the ac-
tivity, neglecting background and irrelevant regions.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture,
benchmarking our model on the Breakfast Actions
Dataset, with a SOTA-matching accuracy of 89.84%.
Because of the modularity of our architecture and of
related work (Hussein et al., 2019a; Hussein et al.,
2019b; Hussein et al., 2020a), our framework could
complement other approaches. Due to the fact that the
strength of our model relies on the way the backbone
is fine-tuned and on the use of attention to account for
the spatial dimension, further modelling of the time
dimension could improve the results. Both PIC (Hus-
sein et al., 2020a) and Timeception (Hussein et al.,
2019a) successfully exploit the time axis and can be
juxtaposed on existing backbones, integrated with our
RA module. Experiments are left for future work. Fi-
nally, future work may include studies on the full I3D
fine-tuning and on a I3D + Region Attention end-to-
end training.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the Early Research Pro-
gram Hybrid AI, and by the research programme Per-
spectief EDL with project number P16-25 project 3,
which is financed by the Dutch Research Council
(NWO), Applied and Engineering Sciences (TTW).
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