  Motion representation plays a vital role in human action recognition in
videos. In this study, we introduce a novel compact motion representation for
video action recognition, named Optical Flow guided Feature (OFF), which
enables the network to distill temporal information through a fast and robust
approach. The OFF is derived from the definition of optical flow and is
orthogonal to the optical flow. The derivation also provides theoretical
support for using the difference between two frames. By directly calculating
pixel-wise spatiotemporal gradients of the deep feature maps, the OFF could be
embedded in any existing CNN based video action recognition framework with only
a slight additional cost. It enables the CNN to extract spatiotemporal
information, especially the temporal information between frames simultaneously.
This simple but powerful idea is validated by experimental results. The network
with OFF fed only by RGB inputs achieves a competitive accuracy of 93.3% on
UCF-101, which is comparable with the result obtained by two streams (RGB and
optical flow), but is 15 times faster in speed. Experimental results also show
that OFF is complementary to other motion modalities such as optical flow. When
the proposed method is plugged into the state-of-the-art video action
recognition framework, it has 96:0% and 74:2% accuracy on UCF-101 and HMDB-51
respectively. The code for this project is available at
https://github.com/kevin-ssy/Optical-Flow-Guided-Feature.
