A Comprehensive Review of Few-shot Action Recognition

Few-shot action recognition aims to address the high cost and impracticality of manually labeling complex and variable video data in action recognition. It requires accurately classifying human actions in videos using only a few labeled examples per class. Compared to few-shot learning in image scenarios, few-shot action recognition is more challenging due to the intrinsic complexity of video data. Recognizing actions involves modeling intricate temporal sequences and extracting rich semantic information, which goes beyond mere human and object identification in each frame. Furthermore, the issue of intra-class variance becomes particularly pronounced with limited video samples, complicating the learning of representative features for novel action categories. To overcome these challenges, numerous approaches have driven significant advancements in few-shot action recognition, which underscores the need for a comprehensive survey. Unlike early surveys that focus on few-shot image or text classification, we deeply consider the unique challenges of few-shot action recognition. In this survey, we review a wide variety of recent methods and summarize the general framework. Additionally, the survey presents the commonly used benchmarks and discusses relevant advanced topics and promising future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a valuable resource for researchers, offering essential guidance to newcomers and stimulating seasoned researchers with fresh insights.