Temporal Residual Networks for Dynamic Scene Recognition

This paper combines three contributions to establish a new state-of-the-art in dynamic scene recognition. First, we present a novel ConvNet architecture based on temporal residual units that is fully convolutional in spacetime. Our model augments spatial ResNets with convolutions across time to hierarchically add temporal residuals as the depth of the network increases. Second, existing approaches to video-based recognition are categorized and a baseline of seven previously top performing algorithms is selected for comparative evaluation on dynamic scenes. Third, we introduce a new and challenging video database of dynamic scenes that more than doubles the size of those previously available. This dataset is explicitly split into two subsets of equal size that contain videos with and without camera motion to allow for systematic study of how this variable interacts with the defining dynamics of the scene per se. Our evaluations verify the particular strengths and weaknesses of the baseline algorithms with respect to various scene classes and camera motion parameters. Finally, our temporal ResNet boosts recognition performance and establishes a new state-of-the-art on dynamic scene recognition, as well as on the complementary task of action recognition.