Improving Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization by Exploiting Multi-resolution Information in Temporal Domain

Weakly supervised temporal action localization is a challenging task as only the video-level annotation is available during the training process. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage approach to fully exploit multi-resolution information in the temporal domain and generate high quality frame-level pseudo labels based on both appearance and motion streams. Specifically, in the first stage, we generate reliable initial frame-level pseudo labels, and in the second stage, we iteratively refine the pseudo labels and use a set of selected frames with highly confident pseudo labels to train neural networks and better predict action class scores at each frame. We fully exploit temporal information at multiple scales to improve temporal action localization performance. Specifically, in order to obtain reliable initial frame-level pseudo labels, in the first stage, we propose an Initial Label Generation (ILG) module, which leverages temporal multi-resolution consistency to generate high quality class activation sequences (CASs), which consist of a number of sequences with each sequence measuring how likely each video frame belongs to one specific action class. In the second stage, we propose a Progressive Temporal Label Refinement (PTLR) framework. In our PTLR framework, two networks called Network-OTS and Network-RTS, which are respectively used to generate CASs for the original temporal scale and the reduced temporal scales, are used as two streams (i.e., the OTS stream and the RTS stream) to refine the pseudo labels in turn. By this way, the multi-resolution information in the temporal domain is exchanged at the pseudo label level, and our work can help improve each stream (i.e., the OTS/RTS stream) by exploiting the refined pseudo labels from another stream (i.e., the RTS/OTS stream).