Watch Only Once: An End-to-End Video Action Detection Framework

We propose an end-to-end pipeline, named Watch Once Only (WOO), for video action detection. Current methods either decouple video action detection task into separated stages of actor localization and action classification or train two separated models within one stage. In contrast, our approach solves the actor localization and action classification simultaneously in a unified network. The whole pipeline is significantly simplified by unifying the backbone network and eliminating many hand-crafted components. WOO takes a unified video backbone to simultaneously extract features for actor location and action classification. In addition, we introduce spatial-temporal action embeddings into our framework and design a spatial-temporal fusion module to obtain more discriminative features with richer information, which further boosts the action classification performance. Extensive experiments on AVA and JHMDB datasets show that WOO achieves state-of-the-art performance, while still reduces up to 16.7% GFLOPs compared with existing methods. We hope our work can inspire re-thinking the convention of action detection and serve as a solid baseline for end-to-end action detection. Code is available at https://github.com/ShoufaChen/WOO.