Learning Attention-Enhanced Spatiotemporal Representation for Action Recognition

Learning spatiotemporal features via 3D-CNN (3D Convolutional Neural Network) models has been regarded as an effective approach for action recognition. In this paper, we explore visual attention mechanism for video analysis and propose a novel 3D-CNN model, dubbed AE-I3D (Attention-Enhanced Inflated-3D Network), for learning attention-enhanced spatiotemporal representation. The contribution of our AE-I3D is threefold: First, we inflate soft attention in spatiotemporal scope for 3D videos, and adopt softmax to generate probability distribution of attentional features in a feedforward 3D-CNN architecture; Second, we devise an AE-Res (Attention-Enhanced Residual learning) module, which learns attention-enhanced features in a two-branch residual learning way, also the AE-Res module is lightweight and flexible, so that can be easily embedded into many 3D-CNN architectures; Finally, we embed multiple AE-Res modules into an I3D (Inflated-3D) network, yielding our AE-I3D model, which can be trained in an end-to-end, video-level manner. Different from previous attention networks, our method inflates residual attention from 2D image to 3D video for 3D attention residual learning to enhance spatiotemporal representation. We use RGB-only video data for evaluation on three benchmarks: UCF101, HMDB51, and Kinetics. The experimental results demonstrate that our AE-I3D is effective with competitive performance.