In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient approach for video representation, called Adversarial Video Distillation (AVD). The key idea is to represent videos by compressing them in the form of realistic images, which can be used in a variety of video-based scene analysis applications. Representing a video as a single image enables us to address the problem of video analysis by image analysis techniques. To this end, we exploit a 3D convolutional encoder-decoder network to encode the input video as an image by minimizing the reconstruction error. Furthermore, weak supervision by an adversarial training procedure is imposed on the output of the encoder to generate semantically realistic images. The encoder learns to extract semantically meaningful representations from a given input video by mapping the 3D input into a 2D latent representation. The obtained representation can be simply used as the input of deep models pre-trained on images for video classification. We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method for video-based activity recognition on three standard and challenging benchmark datasets, i.e. UCF101, HMDB51, and Kinetics. The experimental results demonstrate that AVD achieves interesting performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods for video classification.
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