  Manual spatio-temporal annotation of human action in videos is laborious,
requires several annotators and contains human biases. In this paper, we
present a weakly supervised approach to automatically obtain spatio-temporal
annotations of an actor in action videos. We first obtain a large number of
action proposals in each video. To capture a few most representative action
proposals in each video and evade processing thousands of them, we rank them
using optical flow and saliency in a 3D-MRF based framework and select a few
proposals using MAP based proposal subset selection method. We demonstrate that
this ranking preserves the high quality action proposals. Several such
proposals are generated for each video of the same action. Our next challenge
is to iteratively select one proposal from each video so that all proposals are
globally consistent. We formulate this as Generalized Maximum Clique Graph
problem using shape, global and fine grained similarity of proposals across the
videos. The output of our method is the most action representative proposals
from each video. Our method can also annotate multiple instances of the same
action in a video. We have validated our approach on three challenging action
datasets: UCF Sport, sub-JHMDB and THUMOS'13 and have obtained promising
results compared to several baseline methods. Moreover, on UCF Sports, we
demonstrate that action classifiers trained on these automatically obtained
spatio-temporal annotations have comparable performance to the classifiers
trained on ground truth annotation.
