Deep multiple aggregation networks for action recognition

Most of the current action recognition algorithms are based on deep networks which stack multiple convolutional, pooling and fully connected layers. While convolutional and fully connected operations have been widely studied in the literature, the design of pooling operations that handle action recognition, with different sources of temporal granularity in action categories, has comparatively received less attention, and existing solutions rely mainly on max or averaging operations. The latter are clearly powerless to fully exhibit the actual temporal granularity of action categories and thereby constitute a bottleneck in classification performances. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical pooling design that captures different levels of temporal granularity in action recognition. Our design principle is coarse-to-fine and achieved using a tree-structured network; as we traverse this network top-down, pooling operations are getting less invariant but timely more resolute and well localized. Learning the combination of operations in this network—which best fits a given ground-truth—is obtained by solving a constrained minimization problem whose solution corresponds to the distribution of weights that capture the contribution of each level (and thereby temporal granularity) in the global hierarchical pooling process. Besides being principled and well grounded, the proposed hierarchical pooling is also video-length and resolution agnostic. Extensive experiments conducted on the challenging UCF-101, HMDB-51 and JHMDB-21 databases corroborate all these statements.