Temporally locating and classifying action segments in long untrimmed videos is of particular interest to many applications like surveillance and robotics. While traditional approaches follow a two-step pipeline, by generating framewise probabilities and then feeding them to high-level temporal models, recent approaches use temporal convolutions to directly classify the video frames. In this paper, we introduce a multi-stage architecture for the temporal action segmentation task. Each stage features a set of dilated temporal convolutions to generate an initial prediction that is refined by the next one. This architecture is trained using a combination of a classification loss and a proposed smoothing loss that penalizes over-segmentation errors. Extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed model in capturing long-range dependencies and recognizing action segments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset.

Analyzing human actions in videos has gained increased attention recently. While most works focus on classifying and labeling observed video frames or anticipating the very recent future, making long-term predictions over more than just a few seconds is a task with many practical applications that has not yet been addressed. In this paper, we propose two methods to predict a considerably large amount of future actions and their durations. Both, a CNN and an RNN are trained to learn future video labels based on previously seen content. We show that our methods generate accurate predictions of the future even for long videos with a huge amount of different actions and can even deal with noisy or erroneous input information.

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Anticipating future activities in video is a task with many practical applications. While earlier approaches are limited to just a few seconds in the future, the prediction time horizon has just recently been extended to several minutes in the future. However, as increasing the predicted time horizon, the future becomes more uncertain and models that generate a single prediction fail at capturing the different possible future activities. In this paper, we address the uncertainty modelling for predicting long-term future activities. Both an action model and a length model are trained to model the probability distribution of the future activities. At test time, we sample from the predicted distributions multiple samples that correspond to the different possible sequences of future activities. Our model is evaluated on two challenging datasets and shows a good performance in capturing the multi-modal future activities without compromising the accuracy when predicting a single sequence of future activities.

With the advances in capturing 2D or 3D skeleton data, skeleton-based action recognition has received an increasing interest over the last years. As skeleton data is commonly represented by graphs, graph convolutional networks have been proposed for this task. While current graph convolutional networks accurately recognize actions, they are too expensive for robotics applications where limited computational resources are available. In this paper, we therefore propose a highly efficient graph convolutional network that addresses the limitations of previous works. This is achieved by a parallel structure that gradually fuses motion and spatial information and by reducing the temporal resolution as early as possible. Furthermore, we explicitly address the issue that human poses can contain errors. To this end, the network first refines the poses before they are further processed to recognize the action. We therefore call the network Pose Refinement Graph Convolutional Network. Compared to other graph convolutional networks, our network requires 86%-93% less parameters and reduces the floating point operations by 89%-96% while achieving a comparable accuracy. It therefore provides a much better trade-off between accuracy, memory footprint and processing time, which makes it suitable for robotics applications.