Papers › Temporally-Weighted Hierarchical Clustering for Unsupervised Action Segmentation

Temporally-Weighted Hierarchical Clustering for Unsupervised Action Segmentation

20 Mar 2021CVPR 2021 1arXiv:2103.11264archive 2025-07-28

M. Saquib Sarfraz, Naila Murray, Vivek Sharma, Ali Diba, Luc van Gool, Rainer Stiefelhagen

Action segmentation refers to inferring boundaries of semantically consistent visual concepts in videos and is an important requirement for many video understanding tasks. For this and other video understanding tasks, supervised approaches have achieved encouraging performance but require a high volume of detailed frame-level annotations. We present a fully automatic and unsupervised approach for segmenting actions in a video that does not require any training. Our proposal is an effective temporally-weighted hierarchical clustering algorithm that can group semantically consistent frames of the video. Our main finding is that representing a video with a 1-nearest neighbor graph by taking into account the time progression is sufficient to form semantically and temporally consistent clusters of frames where each cluster may represent some action in the video. Additionally, we establish strong unsupervised baselines for action segmentation and show significant performance improvements over published unsupervised methods on five challenging action segmentation datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/tree/master/TW-FINCH

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Code

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1ran · our draft was wrong
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FINCH ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/TW-FINCH/python/twfinch.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · f333f36a54cff274 · report
clust_rank ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/TW-FINCH/python/twfinch.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 7fc40801f2b43dfc · report
cool_mean ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/TW-FINCH/python/twfinch.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 8b82e4cf700e1ffd · report
req_numclust ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/TW-FINCH/python/twfinch.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 8658952e06494ab4 · report
get_merge ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/TW-FINCH/python/twfinch.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 0aca21662917fe20 · report
update_adj ssarfraz/FINCH-Clustering/TW-FINCH/python/twfinch.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 34c60cf7ca7ee21e · report
get_clust identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · our draft was wrong licence of this copy not recorded · a13645c6a637da8d · report

Tasks

Action SegmentationClusteringSegmentationUnsupervised Action SegmentationVideo Understanding

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Action Segmentation 50 Salads TW-FINCH (K=avg/activity) Acc 66.5 #28 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Action Segmentation Breakfast TW-FINCH (K=avg/activity) Acc 62.7 #37 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Action Segmentation Breakfast TW-FINCH (K=avg/activity) mIoU 42.3 #37 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Action Segmentation MPII Cooking 2 Dataset Unsup. TW-FINCH (K=avg/activity) Accuracy 42 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Action Segmentation MPII Cooking 2 Dataset Unsup. TW-FINCH (K=avg/activity) mIoU 23.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

FINCH Clustering

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