  Deep learning models for video-based action recognition usually generate
features for short clips (consisting of a few frames); such clip-level features
are aggregated to video-level representations by computing statistics on these
features. Typically zero-th (max) or the first-order (average) statistics are
used. In this paper, we explore the benefits of using second-order statistics.
Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable feature aggregation
scheme, dubbed temporal correlation pooling that generates an action descriptor
for a video sequence by capturing the similarities between the temporal
evolution of clip-level CNN features computed across the video. Such a
descriptor, while being computationally cheap, also naturally encodes the
co-activations of multiple CNN features, thereby providing a richer
characterization of actions than their first-order counterparts. We also
propose higher-order extensions of this scheme by computing correlations after
embedding the CNN features in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We provide
experiments on benchmark datasets such as HMDB-51 and UCF-101, fine-grained
datasets such as MPII Cooking activities and JHMDB, as well as the recent
Kinetics-600. Our results demonstrate the advantages of higher-order pooling
schemes that when combined with hand-crafted features (as is standard practice)
achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.
