ARID: A New Dataset for Recognizing Action in the Dark

The task of action recognition in dark videos is useful in various scenarios, e.g., night surveillance and self-driving at night. Though progress has been made in action recognition task for videos in normal illumination, few have studied action recognition in the dark, partly due to the lack of sufficient datasets for such a task. In this paper, we explored the task of action recognition in dark videos. We bridge the gap of the lack of data by collecting a new dataset: the Action Recognition in the Dark (ARID) dataset. It consists of 3,784 video clips with 11 action categories. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first dataset focused on human actions in dark videos. To gain further understanding of our ARID dataset, we analyze our dataset in detail and showed its necessity over synthetic dark videos. Additionally, we benchmark the performance of current action recognition models on our dataset and explored potential methods for increasing their performances. We show that current action recognition models and frame enhancement methods may not be effective solutions for the task of action recognition in dark videos (data available at https://xuyu0010.github.io/arid).