Left/Right Hand Segmentation in Egocentric Videos

Wearable cameras allow people to record their daily activities from a user-centered (First Person Vision) perspective. Due to their favorable location, wearable cameras frequently capture the hands of the user, and may thus represent a promising user-machine interaction tool for different applications. Existent First Person Vision methods handle hand segmentation as a background-foreground problem, ignoring two important facts: i) hands are not a single "skin-like" moving element, but a pair of interacting cooperative entities, ii) close hand interactions may lead to hand-to-hand occlusions and, as a consequence, create a single hand-like segment. These facts complicate a proper understanding of hand movements and interactions. Our approach extends traditional background-foreground strategies, by including a hand-identification step (left-right) based on a Maxwell distribution of angle and position. Hand-to-hand occlusions are addressed by exploiting temporal superpixels. The experimental results show that, in addition to a reliable left/right hand-segmentation, our approach considerably improves the traditional background-foreground hand-segmentation

Fast-Forward Video Based on Semantic Extraction

Thanks to the low operational cost and large storage capacity of smartphones and wearable devices, people are recording many hours of daily activities, sport actions and home videos. These videos, also known as egocentric videos, are generally long-running streams with unedited content, which make them boring and visually unpalatable, bringing up the challenge to make egocentric videos more appealing. In this work we propose a novel methodology to compose the new fast-forward video by selecting frames based on semantic information extracted from images. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art as far as semantic information is concerned and that it is also able to produce videos that are more pleasant to be watched.Comment: Accepted for publication and presented in 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP

Detecting Hands in Egocentric Videos: Towards Action Recognition

Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing human daily activities from data collected by wearable cameras. Since the hands are involved in a vast set of daily tasks, detecting hands in egocentric images is an important step towards the recognition of a variety of egocentric actions. However, besides extreme illumination changes in egocentric images, hand detection is not a trivial task because of the intrinsic large variability of hand appearance. We propose a hand detector that exploits skin modeling for fast hand proposal generation and Convolutional Neural Networks for hand recognition. We tested our method on UNIGE-HANDS dataset and we showed that the proposed approach achieves competitive hand detection results

Towards Semantic Fast-Forward and Stabilized Egocentric Videos

The emergence of low-cost personal mobiles devices and wearable cameras and the increasing storage capacity of video-sharing websites have pushed forward a growing interest towards first-person videos. Since most of the recorded videos compose long-running streams with unedited content, they are tedious and unpleasant to watch. The fast-forward state-of-the-art methods are facing challenges of balancing the smoothness of the video and the emphasis in the relevant frames given a speed-up rate. In this work, we present a methodology capable of summarizing and stabilizing egocentric videos by extracting the semantic information from the frames. This paper also describes a dataset collection with several semantically labeled videos and introduces a new smoothness evaluation metric for egocentric videos that is used to test our method.Comment: Accepted for publication and presented in the First International Workshop on Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing at European Conference on Computer Vision (EPIC@ECCV) 201