Egocentric, or first-person vision which became popular in recent years with an emerge in wearable technology, is different than exocentric (third-person) vision in some distinguishable ways, one of which being that the camera wearer is generally not visible in the video frames. Recent work has been done on action and object recognition in egocentric videos, as well as work on biometric extraction from first-person videos. Height estimation can be a useful feature for both soft-biometrics and object tracking. Here, we propose a method of estimating the height of an egocentric camera without any calibration or reference points. We used both traditional computer vision approaches and deep learning in order to determine the visual cues that results in best height estimation. Here, we introduce a framework inspired by two stream networks comprising of two Convolutional Neural Networks, one based on spatial information, and one based on information given by optical flow in a frame. Given an egocentric video as an input to the framework, our model yields a height estimate as an output. We also incorporate late fusion to learn a combination of temporal and spatial cues. Comparing our model with other methods we used as baselines, we achieve height estimates for videos with a Mean Average Error of 14.04 cm over a range of 103 cm of data, and classification accuracy for relative height (tall, medium or short) up to 93.75 where chance level is 33 .
With increasing popularity of egocentric vision in recent years, much research work is being focused to solve computer vision problems with the perspective of first person. Egocentric or First Person Vision problems are unlike classic computer vision problems since the person whose actions are being recorded is not captured. Egocentric vision poses unique challenges like non-static cameras, unusual view points, motion blur @cite_2 , variations in illumination with the varying positions of camera wearer, real time video analysis requirements, etcetera @cite_8 . Tan @cite_26 demonstrate that challenges posed by egocentric vision can be handled in a more efficient manner if analyzed differently than exocentric. Much work has been done to address classic computer vision problems, now with egocentric perspective such as objects understanding @cite_28 @cite_29 , object detection @cite_20 @cite_18 @cite_2 , object tracking @cite_3 @cite_22 , and activity recognition @cite_24 @cite_4 @cite_15 @cite_11 .
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_3 @cite_24 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_20 @cite_11
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Recent technological advances have made lightweight, head mounted cameras both practical and affordable and products like Google Glass show first approaches to introduce the idea of egocentric (first-person) video to the mainstream. Interestingly, the computer vision community has only recently started to explore this new domain of egocentric vision, where research can roughly be categorized into three areas: Object recognition, activity detection recognition, video summarization. In this paper, we try to give a broad overview about the different problems that have been addressed and collect and compare evaluation results. Moreover, along with the emergence of this new domain came the introduction of numerous new and versatile benchmark datasets, which we summarize and compare as well. We focus on the problem of wearer's action recognition in first person a.k.a. egocentric videos. This problem is more challenging than third person activity recognition due to unavailability of wearer's pose and sharp movements in the videos caused by the natural head motion of the wearer. Carefully crafted features based on hands and objects cues for the problem have been shown to be successful for limited targeted datasets. We propose convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for end to end learning and classification of wearer's actions. The proposed network makes use of egocentric cues by capturing hand pose, head motion and saliency map. It is compact. It can also be trained from relatively small number of labeled egocentric videos that are available. We show that the proposed network can generalize and give state of the art performance on various disparate egocentric action datasets. While egocentric video is becoming increasingly popular, browsing it is very difficult. In this paper we present a compact 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for long-term activity recognition in egocentric videos. Recognizing long-term activities enables us to temporally segment (index) long and unstructured egocentric videos. Existing methods for this task are based on hand tuned features derived from visible objects, location of hands, as well as optical flow. Given a sparse optical flow volume as input, our CNN classifies the camera wearer's activity. We obtain classification accuracy of 89 , which outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 19 . Additional evaluation is performed on an extended egocentric video dataset, classifying twice the amount of categories than current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, our CNN is able to recognize whether a video is egocentric or not with 99.2 accuracy, up by 24 from current state-of-the-art. To better understand what the network actually learns, we propose a novel visualization of CNN kernels as flow fields. 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 .