Boundary-Aware Cascade Networks for Temporal Action Segmentation

Identifying human action segments in an untrimmed video is still challenging due to boundary ambiguity and over-segmentation issues. To address these problems, we present a new boundary-aware cascade network by introducing two novel components. First, we devise a new cascading paradigm, called Stage Cascade, to enable our model to have adaptive receptive fields and more confident predictions for ambiguous frames. Second, we design a general and principled smoothing operation, termed as local barrier pooling, to aggregate local predictions by leveraging semantic boundary information. Moreover, these two components can be jointly fine-tuned in an end-to-end manner. We perform experiments on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, GTEA and Breakfast dataset, demonstrating that our framework significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/BCN .