  Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging problem. Given a
long, untrimmed video consisting of multiple action instances and complex
background contents, we need not only to recognize their action categories, but
also to localize the start time and end time of each instance. Many
state-of-the-art systems use segment-level classifiers to select and rank
proposal segments of pre-determined boundaries. However, a desirable model
should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine
granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. To this end, we
design a novel Convolutional-De-Convolutional (CDC) network that places CDC
filters on top of 3D ConvNets, which have been shown to be effective for
abstracting action semantics but reduce the temporal length of the input data.
The proposed CDC filter performs the required temporal upsampling and spatial
downsampling operations simultaneously to predict actions at the frame-level
granularity. It is unique in jointly modeling action semantics in space-time
and fine-grained temporal dynamics. We train the CDC network in an end-to-end
manner efficiently. Our model not only achieves superior performance in
detecting actions in every frame, but also significantly boosts the precision
of localizing temporal boundaries. Finally, the CDC network demonstrates a very
high efficiency with the ability to process 500 frames per second on a single
GPU server. We will update the camera-ready version and publish the source
codes online soon.
