  Training robust deep video representations has proven to be much more
challenging than learning deep image representations. This is in part due to
the enormous size of raw video streams and the high temporal redundancy; the
true and interesting signal is often drowned in too much irrelevant data.
Motivated by that the superfluous information can be reduced by up to two
orders of magnitude by video compression (using H.264, HEVC, etc.), we propose
to train a deep network directly on the compressed video.
  This representation has a higher information density, and we found the
training to be easier. In addition, the signals in a compressed video provide
free, albeit noisy, motion information. We propose novel techniques to use them
effectively. Our approach is about 4.6 times faster than Res3D and 2.7 times
faster than ResNet-152. On the task of action recognition, our approach
outperforms all the other methods on the UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Charades
dataset.
