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. We have run two types of challenges, the ActEV Sequestered Data Leaderboard based on the MEVA dataset, and the self-reported ActEV TRECVID leaderboard is based on the VIRAT dataset.

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

The TrecVID ActEV 2021 evaluation is only based on the VIRAT V1 and V2 dataset The evaluation will be based on 35 activities from the activities listed in the activities tab and the names and number of activites are same as for the ActEV 2020 evaluation. The data is provided in MPEG-4 format. You can download the public VIDEO dataset for free at viratdata.org; and more info about the datasets is on the data tab. 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 detection, temporal localization using evaluation measures that include the Probability of Missed Detection and Time-Based False Alarm” (TFA) measure. The performance metric for the leaderboard ranking is the partial, normalized Area Under the Detection Error Tradeoff (DET) curve (nAUDC). (see ActEV website for: Evaluation Plan and the ActEV Scoring Software: here

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 and actev.nist.gov/trecvid21
ActEV email: actev-nist@nist.gov