In this paper, we present a novel deep learning based approach for addressing the problem of interaction recognition from a first person perspective. The proposed approach uses a pair of convolutional neural networks, whose parameters are shared, for extracting frame level features from successive frames of the video. The frame level features are then aggregated using a convolutional long short-term memory. The hidden state of the convolutional long short-term memory, after all the input video frames are processed, is used for classification in to the respective categories. The two branches of the convolutional neural network perform feature encoding on a short time interval whereas the convolutional long short term memory encodes the changes on a longer temporal duration. In our network the spatio-temporal structure of the input is preserved till the very final processing stage. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state of the art on most recent first person interactions datasets that involve complex ego-motion. In particular, on UTKinect-FirstPerson it competes with methods that use depth image and skelet al joints information along with RGB images, while it surpasses all previous methods that use only RGB images by more than 20 in recognition accuracy.
More recent studies have focussed on the analysis of interaction recognition in the egocentric vision context. One of the pioneering work in this area is carried out by Ryoo & Matthies in @cite_24 . They extracted optical flow based features and sparse spatio-temporal features from the videos and a bag of words model as the video feature representation. Narayan @cite_16 use the TrajShape @cite_37 , MBH @cite_12 and HOF @cite_37 as the motion features followed by bag of words approach or Fisher vector encoding @cite_14 for generating the feature descriptor. Wray @cite_34 propose graph-based semantic embedding for recognizing egocentric object interactions. Instead of focussing on the objects @cite_15 , Bambach @cite_17 investigate the use of strong region proposals and CNN classifier to locate and distinguish hands involved in an interaction.
@cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_34 @cite_24 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_12 @cite_17
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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. 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 @math 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 @math (actions) and @math (objects). We also include the results of extensive ablative analysis to highlight the importance of network design decisions.. 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 ). Identifying handled objects, i.e. objects being manipulated by a user, is essential for recognizing the person's activities. An egocentric camera as worn on the body enjoys many advantages such as having a natural first-person view and not needing to instrument the environment. It is also a challenging setting, where background clutter is known to be a major source of problems and is difficult to handle with the camera constantly and arbitrarily moving. In this work we develop a bottom-up motion-based approach to robustly segment out foreground objects in egocentric video and show that it greatly improves object recognition accuracy. Our key insight is that egocentric video of object manipulation is a special domain and many domain-specific cues can readily help. We compute dense optical flow and fit it into multiple affine layers. We then use a max-margin classifier to combine motion with empirical knowledge of object location and background movement as well as temporal cues of support region and color appearance. We evaluate our segmentation algorithm on the large Intel Egocentric Object Recognition dataset with 42 objects and 100K frames. We show that, when combined with temporal integration, figure-ground segmentation improves the accuracy of a SIFT-based recognition system from 33 to 60 , and that of a latent-HOG system from 64 to 86 .