Region-aware image-based human action retrieval with transformers

Human action understanding is a fundamental and challenging task in computer vision. Although there exists tremendous research on this area, most works focus on action recognition, while action retrieval has received less attention. In this paper, we focus on the neglected but important task of image-based action retrieval which aims to find images that depict the same action as a query image. We establish benchmarks for this task and set up important baseline methods for fair comparison. We present a Transformer-based model that learns rich action representations from three aspects: the anchored person, contextual regions, and the global image. A fusion transformer is designed to model the relationships among different features and effectively fuse them into an action representation. Experiments on both the Stanford-40 and PASCAL VOC 2012 Action datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous approaches for image-based action retrieval.