EGO-CH: Dataset and Fundamental Tasks for Visitors BehavioralUnderstanding using Egocentric Vision

Equipping visitors of a cultural site with a wearable device allows to easily collect information about their preferences which can be exploited to improve the fruition of cultural goods with augmented reality. Moreover, egocentric video can be processed using computer vision and machine learning to enable an automated analysis of visitors' behavior. The inferred information can be used both online to assist the visitor and offline to support the manager of the site. Despite the positive impact such technologies can have in cultural heritage, the topic is currently understudied due to the limited number of public datasets suitable to study the considered problems. To address this issue, in this paper we propose EGOcentric-Cultural Heritage (EGO-CH), the first dataset of egocentric videos for visitors' behavior understanding in cultural sites. The dataset has been collected in two cultural sites and includes more than $27$ hours of video acquired by $70$ subjects, with labels for $26$ environments and over $200$ different Points of Interest. A large subset of the dataset, consisting of $60$ videos, is associated with surveys filled out by real visitors. To encourage research on the topic, we propose $4$ challenging tasks (room-based localization, point of interest/object recognition, object retrieval and survey prediction) useful to understand visitors' behavior and report baseline results on the dataset

Small Sample Learning in Big Data Era

As a promising area in artificial intelligence, a new learning paradigm, called Small Sample Learning (SSL), has been attracting prominent research attention in the recent years. In this paper, we aim to present a survey to comprehensively introduce the current techniques proposed on this topic. Specifically, current SSL techniques can be mainly divided into two categories. The first category of SSL approaches can be called "concept learning", which emphasizes learning new concepts from only few related observations. The purpose is mainly to simulate human learning behaviors like recognition, generation, imagination, synthesis and analysis. The second category is called "experience learning", which usually co-exists with the large sample learning manner of conventional machine learning. This category mainly focuses on learning with insufficient samples, and can also be called small data learning in some literatures. More extensive surveys on both categories of SSL techniques are introduced and some neuroscience evidences are provided to clarify the rationality of the entire SSL regime, and the relationship with human learning process. Some discussions on the main challenges and possible future research directions along this line are also presented.Comment: 76 pages, 15 figures, survey of small sample learnin