  This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic
Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual
actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and
time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person
occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the
definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise
spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person;
(3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips;
(4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies
to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing
datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse
annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the
dataset publicly.
  AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic
difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel
approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art
methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories.
While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results
on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new
approaches for video understanding.
