2,845 research outputs found
The Evolution of First Person Vision Methods: A Survey
The emergence of new wearable technologies such as action cameras and
smart-glasses has increased the interest of computer vision scientists in the
First Person perspective. Nowadays, this field is attracting attention and
investments of companies aiming to develop commercial devices with First Person
Vision recording capabilities. Due to this interest, an increasing demand of
methods to process these videos, possibly in real-time, is expected. Current
approaches present a particular combinations of different image features and
quantitative methods to accomplish specific objectives like object detection,
activity recognition, user machine interaction and so on. This paper summarizes
the evolution of the state of the art in First Person Vision video analysis
between 1997 and 2014, highlighting, among others, most commonly used features,
methods, challenges and opportunities within the field.Comment: First Person Vision, Egocentric Vision, Wearable Devices, Smart
Glasses, Computer Vision, Video Analytics, Human-machine Interactio
Analysis of the hands in egocentric vision: A survey
Egocentric vision (a.k.a. first-person vision - FPV) applications have
thrived over the past few years, thanks to the availability of affordable
wearable cameras and large annotated datasets. The position of the wearable
camera (usually mounted on the head) allows recording exactly what the camera
wearers have in front of them, in particular hands and manipulated objects.
This intrinsic advantage enables the study of the hands from multiple
perspectives: localizing hands and their parts within the images; understanding
what actions and activities the hands are involved in; and developing
human-computer interfaces that rely on hand gestures. In this survey, we review
the literature that focuses on the hands using egocentric vision, categorizing
the existing approaches into: localization (where are the hands or parts of
them?); interpretation (what are the hands doing?); and application (e.g.,
systems that used egocentric hand cues for solving a specific problem).
Moreover, a list of the most prominent datasets with hand-based annotations is
provided
Opening the Vocabulary of Egocentric Actions
Human actions in egocentric videos are often hand-object interactions
composed from a verb (performed by the hand) applied to an object. Despite
their extensive scaling up, egocentric datasets still face two limitations -
sparsity of action compositions and a closed set of interacting objects. This
paper proposes a novel open vocabulary action recognition task. Given a set of
verbs and objects observed during training, the goal is to generalize the verbs
to an open vocabulary of actions with seen and novel objects. To this end, we
decouple the verb and object predictions via an object-agnostic verb encoder
and a prompt-based object encoder. The prompting leverages CLIP representations
to predict an open vocabulary of interacting objects. We create open vocabulary
benchmarks on the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and Assembly101 datasets; whereas
closed-action methods fail to generalize, our proposed method is effective. In
addition, our object encoder significantly outperforms existing open-vocabulary
visual recognition methods in recognizing novel interacting objects.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures; https://dibschat.github.io/openvocab-egoAR
Understanding egocentric human actions with temporal decision forests
Understanding human actions is a fundamental task in computer vision with a wide range of applications including pervasive health-care, robotics and game control. This thesis focuses on the problem of egocentric action recognition from RGB-D data, wherein the world is viewed through the eyes of the actor whose hands describe the actions.
The main contributions of this work are its findings regarding egocentric actions as described by hands in two application scenarios and a proposal of a new technique that is based on temporal decision forests. The thesis first introduces a novel framework to recognise fingertip writing in mid-air in the context of human-computer interaction. This framework detects whether the user is writing and tracks the fingertip over time to generate spatio-temporal trajectories that are recognised by using a Hough forest variant that encourages temporal consistency in prediction. A problem with using such forest approach for action recognition is that the learning of temporal dynamics is limited to hand-crafted temporal features and temporal regression, which may break the temporal continuity and lead to inconsistent predictions. To overcome this limitation, the thesis proposes transition forests. Besides any temporal information that is encoded in the feature space, the forest automatically learns the temporal dynamics during training, and it is exploited in inference in an online and efficient manner achieving state-of-the-art results. The last contribution of this thesis is its introduction of the first RGB-D benchmark to allow for the study of egocentric hand-object actions with both hand and object pose annotations. This study conducts an extensive evaluation of different baselines, state-of-the art approaches and temporal decision forest models using colour, depth and hand pose features. Furthermore, it extends the transition forest model to incorporate data from different modalities and demonstrates the benefit of using hand pose features to recognise egocentric human actions. The thesis concludes by discussing and analysing the contributions and proposing a few ideas for future work.Open Acces
Egocentric vision-based passive dietary intake monitoring
Egocentric (first-person) perception captures and reveals how people perceive their surroundings. This unique perceptual view enables passive and objective monitoring of human-centric activities and behaviours. In capturing egocentric visual data, wearable cameras are used. Recent advances in wearable technologies have enabled wearable cameras to be lightweight, accurate, and with long battery life, making long-term passive monitoring a promising solution for healthcare and human behaviour understanding. In addition, recent progress in deep learning has provided an opportunity to accelerate the development of passive methods to enable pervasive and accurate monitoring, as well as comprehensive modelling of human-centric behaviours.
This thesis investigates and proposes innovative egocentric technologies for passive dietary intake monitoring and human behaviour analysis.
Compared to conventional dietary assessment methods in nutritional epidemiology, such as 24-hour dietary recall (24HR) and food frequency questionnaires (FFQs), which heavily rely on subjects’ memory to recall the dietary intake, and trained dietitians to collect, interpret, and analyse the dietary data, passive dietary intake monitoring can ease such burden and provide more accurate and objective assessment of dietary intake. Egocentric vision-based passive monitoring uses wearable cameras to continuously record human-centric activities with a close-up view. This passive way of monitoring does not require active participation from the subject, and records rich spatiotemporal details for fine-grained analysis. Based on egocentric vision and passive dietary intake monitoring, this thesis proposes: 1) a novel network structure called PAR-Net to achieve accurate food recognition by mining discriminative food regions. PAR-Net has been evaluated with food intake images captured by wearable cameras as well as those non-egocentric food images to validate its effectiveness for food recognition; 2) a deep learning-based solution for recognising consumed food items as well as counting the number of bites taken by the subjects from egocentric videos in an end-to-end manner; 3) in light of privacy concerns in egocentric data, this thesis also proposes a privacy-preserved solution for passive dietary intake monitoring, which uses image captioning techniques to summarise the image content and subsequently combines image captioning with 3D container reconstruction to report the actual food volume consumed. Furthermore, a novel framework that integrates food recognition, hand tracking and face recognition has also been developed to tackle the challenge of assessing individual dietary intake in food sharing scenarios with the use of a panoramic camera. Extensive experiments have been conducted. Tested with both laboratory (captured in London) and field study data (captured in Africa), the above proposed solutions have proven the feasibility and accuracy of using the egocentric camera technologies with deep learning methods for individual dietary assessment and human behaviour analysis.Open Acces
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