Abstract
Learning comprehensive spatiotemporal features is crucial for human action recognition. Existing methods tend to model the spatiotemporal feature blocks in an integrate-separate-integrate form, such as appearance-and-relation network (ARTNet) and spatiotemporal and motion network (STM). However, with blocks stacking up, the rear part of the network has poor interpretability. To avoid this problem, we propose a novel architecture called spatial temporal relation network (STRNet), which can learn explicit information of appearance, motion and especially the temporal relation information. Specifically, our STRNet is constructed by three branches, which separates the features into 1) appearance pathway, to obtain spatial semantics, 2) motion pathway, to reinforce the spatiotemporal feature representation, and 3) relation pathway, to focus on capturing temporal relation details of successive frames and to explore long-term representation dependency. In addition, our STRNet does not just simply merge the multi-branch information, but we apply a flexible and effective strategy to fuse the complementary information from multiple pathways. We evaluate our network on four major action recognition benchmarks: Kinetics-400, UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Something-Something v1, demonstrating that the performance of our STRNet achieves the state-of-the-art result on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets, as well as a comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-art method on Something-Something v1 and Kinetics-400.