When people observe and interact with physical spaces, they are able to
associate functionality to regions in the environment. Our goal is to automate
dense functional understanding of large spaces by leveraging sparse activity
demonstrations recorded from an ego-centric viewpoint. The method we describe
enables functionality estimation in large scenes where people have behaved, as
well as novel scenes where no behaviors are observed. Our method learns and
predicts "Action Maps", which encode the ability for a user to perform
activities at various locations. With the usage of an egocentric camera to
observe human activities, our method scales with the size of the scene without
the need for mounting multiple static surveillance cameras and is well-suited
to the task of observing activities up-close. We demonstrate that by capturing
appearance-based attributes of the environment and associating these attributes
with activity demonstrations, our proposed mathematical framework allows for
the prediction of Action Maps in new environments. Additionally, we offer a
preliminary glance of the applicability of Action Maps by demonstrating a
proof-of-concept application in which they are used in concert with activity
detections to perform localization.Comment: To appear at CVPR 201