We bring together ideas from recent work on feature design for egocentric
action recognition under one framework by exploring the use of deep
convolutional neural networks (CNN). Recent work has shown that features such
as hand appearance, object attributes, local hand motion and camera ego-motion
are important for characterizing first-person actions. To integrate these ideas
under one framework, we propose a twin stream network architecture, where one
stream analyzes appearance information and the other stream analyzes motion
information. Our appearance stream encodes prior knowledge of the egocentric
paradigm by explicitly training the network to segment hands and localize
objects. By visualizing certain neuron activation of our network, we show that
our proposed architecture naturally learns features that capture object
attributes and hand-object configurations. Our extensive experiments on
benchmark egocentric action datasets show that our deep architecture enables
recognition rates that significantly outperform state-of-the-art techniques --
an average 6.6% increase in accuracy over all datasets. Furthermore, by
learning to recognize objects, actions and activities jointly, the performance
of individual recognition tasks also increase by 30% (actions) and 14%
(objects). We also include the results of extensive ablative analysis to
highlight the importance of network design decisions.