The THUMOS challenge on action recognition for videos “in the wild”☆

•THUMOS challenge was introduced in 2013 to serve as a benchmark for action recognition.•In this paper we describe the THUMOS benchmark in detail.•Give an overview of data collection and annotation procedures.•Present results of submissions to the THUMOS 2015 challenge and review the participating approaches.•We conclude by proposing several directions and improvements for future THUMOS challenges.