  Temporal action detection is a very important yet challenging problem, since
videos in real applications are usually long, untrimmed and contain multiple
action instances. This problem requires not only recognizing action categories
but also detecting start time and end time of each action instance. Many
state-of-the-art methods adopt the "detection by classification" framework:
first do proposal, and then classify proposals. The main drawback of this
framework is that the boundaries of action instance proposals have been fixed
during the classification step. To address this issue, we propose a novel
Single Shot Action Detector (SSAD) network based on 1D temporal convolutional
layers to skip the proposal generation step via directly detecting action
instances in untrimmed video. On pursuit of designing a particular SSAD network
that can work effectively for temporal action detection, we empirically search
for the best network architecture of SSAD due to lacking existing models that
can be directly adopted. Moreover, we investigate into input feature types and
fusion strategies to further improve detection accuracy. We conduct extensive
experiments on two challenging datasets: THUMOS 2014 and MEXaction2. When
setting Intersection-over-Union threshold to 0.5 during evaluation, SSAD
significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art systems by increasing mAP from
19.0% to 24.6% on THUMOS 2014 and from 7.4% to 11.0% on MEXaction2.
