Divide and Conquer for Single-frame Temporal Action Localization

Single-frame temporal action localization (STAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only one timestamp annotation for each action instance. Existing methods adopt the one-stage framework but couple the counting goal and the localization goal. This paper proposes a novel two-stage framework for the STAL task with the spirit of divide and conquer. The instance counting stage leverages the location supervision to determine the number of action instances and divide a whole video into multiple video clips, so that each video clip contains only one complete action instance; and the location estimation stage leverages the category supervision to localize the action instance in each video clip. To efficiently represent the action instance in each video clip, we introduce the proposal-based representation, and design a novel differentiable mask generator to enable the end-to-end training supervised by category labels. On THUMOS14, GTEA, and BEOID datasets, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 3.5%, 2.7%, 4.8% mAP on average. And extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method.