Anticipating Next Active Objects for Egocentric Videos

TL;DR

This paper introduces ANACTO, a transformer-based framework for predicting the location of the next active object in egocentric videos before contact occurs, addressing a novel problem in first-person action anticipation.

Contribution

It proposes the first method to anticipate the next active object and its location in egocentric videos, using a self-attention transformer model and providing new annotations for multiple datasets.

Findings

Our method outperforms baseline approaches on three datasets.

The approach effectively predicts the next active object before contact.

Ablation studies confirm the importance of the proposed components.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of anticipating the next-active-object location in the future, for a given egocentric video clip where the contact might happen, before any action takes place. The problem is considerably hard, as we aim at estimating the position of such objects in a scenario where the observed clip and the action segment are separated by the so-called ``time to contact'' (TTC) segment. Many methods have been proposed to anticipate the action of a person based on previous hand movements and interactions with the surroundings. However, there have been no attempts to investigate the next possible interactable object, and its future location with respect to the first-person's motion and the field-of-view drift during the TTC window. We define this as the task of Anticipating the Next ACTive Object (ANACTO). To this end, we propose a transformer-based self-attention framework to identify and locate the next-active-object in an egocentric clip. We benchmark our method on three datasets: EpicKitchens-100, EGTEA+ and Ego4D. We also provide annotations for the first two datasets. Our approach performs best compared to relevant baseline methods. We also conduct ablation studies to understand the effectiveness of the proposed and baseline methods on varying conditions. Code and ANACTO task annotations will be made available upon paper acceptance.