Distill and Collect for Semi-Supervised Temporal Action Segmentation

Abstract: Recent temporal action segmentation approaches need frame annotations during training to be effective. These annotations are very expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This limits their performances when only limited annotated data is available. In contrast, we can easily collect a large corpus of in-domain unannotated videos by scavenging through the internet. Thus, this paper proposes an approach for the temporal action segmentation task that can simultaneously leverage knowledge from annotated and unannotated video sequences. Our approach uses multi-stream distillation that repeatedly refines and finally combines their frame predictions. Our model also predicts the action order, which is later used as a temporal constraint while estimating frames labels to counter the lack of supervision for unannotated videos. In the end, our evaluation of the proposed approach on two different datasets demonstrates its capability to achieve comparable performance to the full supervision despite limited annotation.