Real-Time End-to-End Action Detection with Two-Stream Networks

Two-stream networks have been very successful for solving the problem of action detection. However, prior work using two-stream networks train both streams separately, which prevents the network from exploiting regularities between the two streams. Moreover, unlike the visual stream, the dominant forms of optical flow computation typically do not maximally exploit GPU parallelism. We present a real-time end-to-end trainable two-stream network for action detection. First, we integrate the optical flow computation in our framework by using Flownet2. Second, we apply early fusion for the two streams and train the whole pipeline jointly end-to-end. Finally, for better network initialization, we transfer from the task of action recognition to action detection by pre-training our framework using the recently released large-scale Kinetics dataset. Our experimental results show that training the pipeline jointly end-to-end with fine-tuning the optical flow for the objective of action detection improves detection performance significantly. Additionally, we observe an improvement when initializing with parameters pre-trained using Kinetics. Last, we show that by integrating the optical flow computation, our framework is more efficient, running at real-time speeds (up to 31 fps). Keywords-Action detection, Two-stream networks, Video understanding