Online Spatiotemporal Action Detection and Prediction via Causal Representations

Abstract: In this thesis, we focus on video action understanding problems from an online and real-time processing point of view. We start with the conversion of the traditional offline spatiotemporal action detection pipeline into an online spatiotemporal action tube detection system. An action tube is a set of bounding connected over time, which bounds an action instance in space and time. Next, we explore the future prediction capabilities of such detection methods by extending an existing action tube into the future by regression. Later, we seek to establish that online/causal representations can achieve similar performance to that of offline three dimensional (3D) convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on various tasks, including action recognition, temporal action segmentation and early prediction.