Performance Evaluation of Action Recognition Models on Low Quality Videos

In the design of action recognition models, the quality of videos is an important issue; however, the trade-off between the quality and performance is often ignored. In general, action recognition models are trained on high-quality videos, hence it is not known how the model performance degrades when tested on low-quality videos, and how much the quality of training videos affects the performance. The issue of video quality is important, however, it has not been studied so far. The goal of this study is to show the trade-off between the performance and the quality of training and test videos by quantitative performance evaluation of several action recognition models for transcoded videos in different qualities. First, we show how the video quality affects the performance of pre-trained models. We transcode the original validation videos of Kinetics400 by changing quality control parameters of JPEG (compression strength) and H.264/AVC (CRF). Then we use the transcoded videos to validate the pre-trained models. Second, we show how the models perform when trained on transcoded videos. We transcode the original training videos of Kinetics400 by changing the quality parameters of JPEG and H.264/AVC. Then we train the models on the transcoded training videos and validate them with the original and transcoded validation videos. Experimental results with JPEG transcoding show that there is no severe performance degradation (up to −1.5%) for compression strength smaller than 70 where no quality degradation is visually observed, and for larger than 80 the performance degrades linearly with respect to the quality index. Experiments with H.264/AVC transcoding show that there is no significant performance loss (up to −1%) with CRF30 while the total size of video files is reduced to 30%. In summary, the video quality doesn’t have a large impact on the performance of action recognition models unless the quality degradation is severe and visible. This enables us to transcode the training and validation videos and reduce the file sizes to one-third of the original videos.