  We introduce a class of causal video understanding models that aims to
improve efficiency of video processing by maximising throughput, minimising
latency, and reducing the number of clock cycles. Leveraging operation
pipelining and multi-rate clocks, these models perform a minimal amount of
computation (e.g. as few as four convolutional layers) for each frame per
timestep to produce an output. The models are still very deep, with dozens of
such operations being performed but in a pipelined fashion that enables
depth-parallel computation. We illustrate the proposed principles by applying
them to existing image architectures and analyse their behaviour on two video
tasks: action recognition and human keypoint localisation. The results show
that a significant degree of parallelism, and implicitly speedup, can be
achieved with little loss in performance.
