172 research outputs found
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
Egocentric Hand Detection Via Dynamic Region Growing
Egocentric videos, which mainly record the activities carried out by the
users of the wearable cameras, have drawn much research attentions in recent
years. Due to its lengthy content, a large number of ego-related applications
have been developed to abstract the captured videos. As the users are
accustomed to interacting with the target objects using their own hands while
their hands usually appear within their visual fields during the interaction,
an egocentric hand detection step is involved in tasks like gesture
recognition, action recognition and social interaction understanding. In this
work, we propose a dynamic region growing approach for hand region detection in
egocentric videos, by jointly considering hand-related motion and egocentric
cues. We first determine seed regions that most likely belong to the hand, by
analyzing the motion patterns across successive frames. The hand regions can
then be located by extending from the seed regions, according to the scores
computed for the adjacent superpixels. These scores are derived from four
egocentric cues: contrast, location, position consistency and appearance
continuity. We discuss how to apply the proposed method in real-life scenarios,
where multiple hands irregularly appear and disappear from the videos.
Experimental results on public datasets show that the proposed method achieves
superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods, especially in
complicated scenarios
Analysis of Hand Segmentation in the Wild
A large number of works in egocentric vision have concentrated on action and
object recognition. Detection and segmentation of hands in first-person videos,
however, has less been explored. For many applications in this domain, it is
necessary to accurately segment not only hands of the camera wearer but also
the hands of others with whom he is interacting. Here, we take an in-depth look
at the hand segmentation problem. In the quest for robust hand segmentation
methods, we evaluated the performance of the state of the art semantic
segmentation methods, off the shelf and fine-tuned, on existing datasets. We
fine-tune RefineNet, a leading semantic segmentation method, for hand
segmentation and find that it does much better than the best contenders.
Existing hand segmentation datasets are collected in the laboratory settings.
To overcome this limitation, we contribute by collecting two new datasets: a)
EgoYouTubeHands including egocentric videos containing hands in the wild, and
b) HandOverFace to analyze the performance of our models in presence of similar
appearance occlusions. We further explore whether conditional random fields can
help refine generated hand segmentations. To demonstrate the benefit of
accurate hand maps, we train a CNN for hand-based activity recognition and
achieve higher accuracy when a CNN was trained using hand maps produced by the
fine-tuned RefineNet. Finally, we annotate a subset of the EgoHands dataset for
fine-grained action recognition and show that an accuracy of 58.6% can be
achieved by just looking at a single hand pose which is much better than the
chance level (12.5%).Comment: Accepted at CVPR 201
Recognition of Activities of Daily Living with Egocentric Vision: A Review.
Video-based recognition of activities of daily living (ADLs) is being used in ambient assisted living systems in order to support the independent living of older people. However, current systems based on cameras located in the environment present a number of problems, such as occlusions and a limited field of view. Recently, wearable cameras have begun to be exploited. This paper presents a review of the state of the art of egocentric vision systems for the recognition of ADLs following a hierarchical structure: motion, action and activity levels, where each level provides higher semantic information and involves a longer time frame. The current egocentric vision literature suggests that ADLs recognition is mainly driven by the objects present in the scene, especially those associated with specific tasks. However, although object-based approaches have proven popular, object recognition remains a challenge due to the intra-class variations found in unconstrained scenarios. As a consequence, the performance of current systems is far from satisfactory
Identifying First-person Camera Wearers in Third-person Videos
We consider scenarios in which we wish to perform joint scene understanding,
object tracking, activity recognition, and other tasks in environments in which
multiple people are wearing body-worn cameras while a third-person static
camera also captures the scene. To do this, we need to establish person-level
correspondences across first- and third-person videos, which is challenging
because the camera wearer is not visible from his/her own egocentric video,
preventing the use of direct feature matching. In this paper, we propose a new
semi-Siamese Convolutional Neural Network architecture to address this novel
challenge. We formulate the problem as learning a joint embedding space for
first- and third-person videos that considers both spatial- and motion-domain
cues. A new triplet loss function is designed to minimize the distance between
correct first- and third-person matches while maximizing the distance between
incorrect ones. This end-to-end approach performs significantly better than
several baselines, in part by learning the first- and third-person features
optimized for matching jointly with the distance measure itself
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
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