Micro-Action Recognition (MAR) has gained increasing attention due to its crucial role as a form of non-verbal communication in social interactions, with promising potential for applications in human communication and emotion analysis. However, current approaches often overlook the inherent ambiguity in micro-actions, which arises from the wide category range and subtle visual differences between categories. This oversight hampers the accuracy of micro-action recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Network (\textbf{PCAN}) to unleash and mitigate the ambiguity of MAR. \textbf{Firstly}, we employ a hierarchical action-tree to identify the ambiguous sample, categorizing them into distinct sets of ambiguous samples of false negatives and false positives, considering both body- and action-level categories. \textbf{Secondly}, we implement an ambiguous contrastive refinement module to calibrate these ambiguous samples by regulating the distance between ambiguous samples and their corresponding prototypes. This calibration process aims to pull false negative ($\mathbb{FN}$) samples closer to their respective prototypes and push false positive ($\mathbb{FP}$) samples apart from their affiliated prototypes. In addition, we propose a new prototypical diversity amplification loss to strengthen the model's capacity by amplifying the differences between different prototypes. \textbf{Finally}, we propose a prototype-guided rectification to rectify prediction by incorporating the representability of prototypes. Extensive experiments conducted on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/kunli-cs/PCAN.
Micro-action is an imperceptible non-verbal behaviour characterised by low-intensity movement. It offers insights into the feelings and intentions of individuals and is important for human-oriented applications such as emotion recognition and psychological assessment. However, the identification, differentiation, and understanding of micro-actions pose challenges due to the imperceptible and inaccessible nature of these subtle human behaviors in everyday life. In this study, we innovatively collect a new micro-action dataset designated as Micro-action-52 (MA-52), and propose a benchmark named micro-action network (MANet) for micro-action recognition (MAR) task. Uniquely, MA-52 provides the whole-body perspective including gestures, upper- and lower-limb movements, attempting to reveal comprehensive micro-action cues. In detail, MA-52 contains 52 micro-action categories along with seven body part labels, and encompasses a full array of realistic and natural micro-actions, accounting for 205 participants and 22,422 video instances collated from the psychological interviews. Based on the proposed dataset, we assess MANet and other nine prevalent action recognition methods. MANet incorporates squeeze-and excitation (SE) and temporal shift module (TSM) into the ResNet architecture for modeling the spatiotemporal characteristics of micro-actions. Then a joint-embedding loss is designed for semantic matching between video and action labels; the loss is used to better distinguish between visually similar yet distinct micro-action categories. The extended application in emotion recognition has demonstrated one of the important values of our proposed dataset and method. In the future, further exploration of human behaviour, emotion, and psychological assessment will be conducted in depth. The dataset and source code are released at https://github.com/VUT-HFUT/Micro-Action.
Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection lies at the core of action understanding. Besides 2D information such as human/object appearance and locations, 3D pose is also usually utilized in HOI learning since its view-independence. However, rough 3D body joints just carry sparse body information and are not sufficient to understand complex interactions. Thus, we need detailed 3D body shape to go further. Meanwhile, the interacted object in 3D is also not fully studied in HOI learning. In light of these, we propose a detailed 2D-3D joint representation learning method. First, we utilize the single-view human body capture method to obtain detailed 3D body, face and hand shapes. Next, we estimate the 3D object location and size with reference to the 2D human-object spatial configuration and object category priors. Finally, a joint learning framework and cross-modal consistency tasks are proposed to learn the joint HOI representation. To better evaluate the 2D ambiguity processing capacity of models, we propose a new benchmark named Ambiguous-HOI consisting of hard ambiguous images. Extensive experiments in large-scale HOI benchmark and Ambiguous-HOI show impressive effectiveness of our method. Code and data are available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/DJ-RN.
The explosive growth in video streaming gives rise to challenges on performing video understanding at high accuracy and low computation cost. Conventional 2D CNNs are computationally cheap but cannot capture temporal relationships; 3D CNN based methods can achieve good performance but are computationally intensive, making it expensive to deploy. In this paper, we propose a generic and effective Temporal Shift Module (TSM) that enjoys both high efficiency and high performance. Specifically, it can achieve the performance of 3D CNN but maintain 2D CNN's complexity. TSM shifts part of the channels along the temporal dimension; thus facilitate information exchanged among neighboring frames. It can be inserted into 2D CNNs to achieve temporal modeling at zero computation and zero parameters. We also extended TSM to online setting, which enables real-time low-latency online video recognition and video object detection. TSM is accurate and efficient: it ranks the first place on the Something-Something leaderboard upon publication; on Jetson Nano and Galaxy Note8, it achieves a low latency of 13ms and 35ms for online video recognition. The code is available at: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/temporal-shift-module.
Deep convolutional networks have achieved great success for image recognition. However, for action recognition in videos, their advantage over traditional methods is not so evident. We present a general and flexible video-level framework for learning action models in videos. This method, called temporal segment network (TSN), aims to model long-range temporal structures with a new segment-based sampling and aggregation module. This unique design enables our TSN to efficiently learn action models by using the whole action videos. The learned models could be easily adapted for action recognition in both trimmed and untrimmed videos with simple average pooling and multi-scale temporal window integration, respectively. We also study a series of good practices for the instantiation of TSN framework given limited training samples. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on four challenging action recognition benchmarks: HMDB51 (71.0%), UCF101 (94.9%), THUMOS14 (80.1%), and ActivityNet v1.2 (89.6%). Using the proposed RGB difference for motion models, our method can still achieve competitive accuracy on UCF101 (91.0%) while running at 340 FPS. Furthermore, based on the temporal segment networks, we won the video classification track at the ActivityNet challenge 2016 among 24 teams, which demonstrates the effectiveness of TSN and the proposed good practices.