Activities in Extended Video (ActEV)

Task Coordinators: ActEV NIST team

ActEV is a series of evaluations to accelerate development of robust, multi-camera, automatic activity detection algorithms for forensic and real-time alerting applications. ActEV is an extension of the annual TRECVID Surveillance Event Detection (SED) evaluation where systems will also detect, and track objects involved in the activities. Each evaluation will challenge systems with new data, system requirements, and/or new activities. At a high level, activity detection algorithms can be classified as either: unconstrained and constrained. The first evaluation will focus on the unconstrained condition only.

• Unconstrained: For the latency, unconstrained condition, a system processes the whole video in the full corpus prior to returning a list of detected activity instances. The primary application of the evaluation condition includes a forensic investigation/analysis tool.
• Constrained: For the latency, constrained condition, a system detects the presence of the target activity instance within a predefined duration (e.g., 2 seconds) from the time the target activity begins in a video streaming environment. A system on this evaluation condition supports a real-time alert application.

What is Activity Detection in Videos?

For this evaluation, an activity is defined to be “one or more people performing a specified movement or interacting with an object or group of objects”.

Who: NIST invites all organizations, particularly universities and corporations, to submit their results using their technologies to the ActEV evaluation server. The evaluation is open worldwide. Participation is free. NIST does not provide funds to participants.

How: To take part in the ActEV evaluation you need to create an account on the ActEV scoring server (Please visit the ActEV task website). Using a valid registered account, you will be able to upload your JSON format results (see the ActEV task website for: Evaluation Plan) to the ActEV scoring server and participate in the ActEV evaluation. Each team is limited to a fixed number of submissions (see website for: Evaluation Plan). Only results that are submitted during the evaluation period and follow the Evaluation Plan will be considered valid and posted on the leaderboard website.

Why: The primary driver of the evaluation is to support investigations of crime by automatic activity detection in streaming video. These videos are of interest to NIST's partner agencies that seek to employ automatic activity detection in investigating of crime. ActEV evaluation seeks to develop robust automatic activity detection for a multi-camera streaming video environment. Activities will be enriched by person and object detection. ActEV will address activity detection for both forensic applications and for real-time alerting.

Data

Trecvid ActEV evaluation will challenge systems with a new larger dataset, and new activities. For information about the data used in the ActEV evaluation, please check the ActEV task website for: Licensing and Participation Agreements, and Evaluation Plan. For provided development and testing data please see the ActEV task website.

Metrics

The main scoring metrics will be based on temporal localization and spatio-temporal localization. We will use standard evaluation measures (e.g., probability of missed detection, rate of false alarm, precision, recall, average precision) and self-reported speed (see ActEV website for: Evaluation Plan and ActEV Scoring Software: https://github.com/usnistgov/ActEV_Scorer)

NIST Role:

NIST will be conducting a series of evaluations to accelerate development of robust, multi-camera, automatic activity detection algorithms for forensic and real-time alerting applications. Each evaluation will challenge systems with new data, system requirements, and/or new activities.

ActEV website: actev.nist.gov
ActEV email: actev-nist@nist.gov