# ACDnet: An action detection network for real-time edge computing based on flow-guided feature approximation and memory aggregation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13493 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13493/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Representation with Pseudo-3D Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10305/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Two-Stream Network Fusion for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06573/) (2016)
- [Video Action Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02707/) (2018)
- [Deep Feature Flow for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07715/) (2016)
- [Flow-Guided Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10025/) (2017)
- [STM: SpatioTemporal and Motion Encoding for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02486/) (2019)
- [Actor-Centric Relation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10982/) (2018)
- [Optical Flow Guided Feature: A Fast and Robust Motion Representation for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11152/) (2017)
- [Action Tubelet Detector for Spatio-Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01861/) (2017)
- [Fast Optical Flow using Dense Inverse Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03590/) (2016)
- [Seq-NMS for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.08465/) (2016)
- [T-CNN: Tubelets with Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Detection from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02532/) (2016)
- [You Only Watch Once: A Unified CNN Architecture for Real-Time Spatiotemporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06644/) (2019)
- [Online Real-time Multiple Spatiotemporal Action Localisation and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08563/) (2016)
- [Actions as Moving Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04608/) (2020)
- [STEP: Spatio-Temporal Progressive Learning for Video Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09288/) (2019)
- [Mobile Video Object Detection with Temporally-Aware Feature Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06368/) (2017)
- [Dance with Flow: Two-in-One Stream Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00696/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Holistic Interaction Transformer Network for Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12686/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning-based Spatio-temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01618/) (2023)
- [Explore Spatio-temporal Aggregation for Insubstantial Object Detection: Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11459/) (2022)
- [A Semantic and Motion-Aware Spatiotemporal Transformer Network for Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08204/) (2024)
- [Resource-Efficient RGB-Only Action Recognition for Edge Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10818/) (2026)
- [Temporal Preservation over Processing: Diagnosing and Designing Spatiotemporal Single-Stage Video Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31421/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interpreting human actions requires understanding the spatial and temporal context of the scenes. State-of-the-art action detectors based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have demonstrated remarkable results by adopting two-stream or 3D CNN architectures. However, these methods typically operate in a non-real-time, ofline fashion due to system complexity to reason spatio-temporal information. Consequently, their high computational cost is not compliant with emerging real-world scenarios such as service robots or public surveillance where detection needs to take place at resource-limited edge devices. In this paper, we propose ACDnet, a compact action detection network targeting real-time edge computing which addresses both efficiency and accuracy. It intelligently exploits the temporal coherence between successive video frames to approximate their CNN features rather than naively extracting them. It also integrates memory feature aggregation from past video frames to enhance current detection stability, implicitly modeling long temporal cues over time. Experiments conducted on the public benchmark datasets UCF-24 and JHMDB-21 demonstrate that ACDnet, when integrated with the SSD detector, can robustly achieve detection well above real-time (75 FPS). At the same time, it retains reasonable accuracy (70.92 and 49.53 frame mAP) compared to other top-performing methods using far heavier configurations. Codes will be available at https://github.com/dginhac/ACDnet.