Going Deeper into First-Person Activity Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a twin stream deep CNN architecture for egocentric activity recognition, integrating appearance and motion analysis, leading to significant accuracy improvements over previous methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel dual-stream network that explicitly models hand-object interactions and localizes objects, enhancing first-person activity recognition performance.

Findings

Achieved an average 6.6% accuracy increase over state-of-the-art methods.

Joint recognition of objects, actions, and activities improves individual task performance.

Extensive ablation studies highlight the importance of network design choices.

Abstract

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..