Posted by Joonseok Lee and Joe Yue-Hei Ng, Software Engineers, Google Research

Over the last two years, the First and Second YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding Challenge and Workshop have collectively drawn 1000+ teams from 60+ countries to further advance large-scale video understanding research. While these events have enabled great progress in video classification, the YouTube dataset on which they were based only used machine-generated video-level labels, and lacked fine-grained temporally localized information, which limited the ability of machine learning models to predict video content.

To accelerate the research of temporal concept localization, we are excited to announce the release of YouTube-8M Segments, a new extension of the YouTube-8M dataset that includes human-verified labels at the 5-second segment level on a subset of YouTube-8M videos. With the additional temporal annotations, YouTube-8M is now both a large-scale classification dataset as well as a temporal localization dataset. In addition, we are hosting another Kaggle video understanding challenge focused on temporal localization, as well as an affiliated 3rd Workshop on YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding at the 2019 International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV’19).



YouTube-8M Segments
Video segment labels provide a valuable resource for temporal localization not possible with video-level labels, and enable novel applications, such as capturing special video moments. Instead of exhaustively labeling all segments in a video, to create the YouTube-8M Segments extension, we manually labeled 5 segments (on average) per randomly selected video on the YouTube-8M validation dataset, totalling ~237k segments covering 1000 categories.

This dataset, combined with the previous YouTube-8M release containing a very large number of machine generated video-level labels, should allow learning temporal localization models in novel ways. Evaluating such classifiers is of course very challenging if only noisy video-level labels are available. We hope that the newly added human-labeled annotations will help ensure that researchers can more accurately evaluate their algorithms.

The 3rd YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge
This year the YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge focuses on temporal localization. Participants are encouraged to leverage noisy video-level labels together with a small segment-level validation set in order to better annotate and temporally localize concepts of interest. Unlike last year, there is no model size restriction. Each of the top 10 teams will be awarded $2,500 to support their travel to Seoul to attend ICCV’19. For details, please visit the Kaggle competition page.

The 3rd Workshop on YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding
Continuing in the tradition of the previous two years, the 3rd workshop will feature four invited talks by distinguished researchers as well as presentations by top-performing challenge participants. We encourage those who wish to attend to submit papers describing their research, experiments, or applications based on the YouTube-8M dataset, including papers summarizing their participation in the challenge above. Please refer to the workshop page for more details.

It is our hope that this newest extension will serve as a unique playground for temporal localization that mimics real world scenarios. We also look forward to the new challenge and workshop, which we believe will continue to advance research in large-scale video understanding. We hope you will join us again!

Acknowledgements
This post reflects the work of many machine perception researchers including Ke Chen, Nisarg Kothari, Joonseok Lee, Hanhan Li, Paul Natsev, Joe Yue-Hei Ng, Naderi Parizi, David Ross, Cordelia Schmid, Javier Snaider, Rahul Sukthankar, George Toderici, Balakrishnan Varadarajan, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan, Yexin Wang, Zheng Xu, as well as Julia Elliott and Walter Reade from Kaggle. We are also grateful for the support and advice from our partners at YouTube.