text: On a minute-to-minute basis people undergo numerous fluid interactions with objects that barely register on a conscious level. Recent neuroscientific research demonstrates that humans have a fixed size prior for salient objects. This suggests that a salient object in 3D undergoes a consistent transformation such that people's visual system perceives it with an approximately fixed size. This finding indicates that there exists a consistent egocentric object prior that can be characterized by shape, size, depth, and location in the first person view. In this paper, we develop an EgoObject Representation, which encodes these characteristics by incorporating shape, location, size and depth features from an egocentric RGBD image. We empirically show that this representation can accurately characterize the egocentric object prior by testing it on an egocentric RGBD dataset for three tasks: the 3D saliency detection, future saliency prediction, and interaction classification. This representation is evaluated on our new Egocentric RGBD Saliency dataset that includes various activities such as cooking, dining, and shopping. By using our EgoObject representation, we outperform previously proposed models for saliency detection (relative 30 improvement for 3D saliency detection task) on our dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate that this representation allows us to predict future salient objects based on the gaze cue and classify people's interactions with objects.
  @cite_21: We present a novel dataset and novel algorithms for the problem of detecting activities of daily living (ADL) in firstperson camera views. We have collected a dataset of 1 million frames of dozens of people performing unscripted, everyday activities. The dataset is annotated with activities, object tracks, hand positions, and interaction events. ADLs differ from typical actions in that they can involve long-scale temporal structure (making tea can take a few minutes) and complex object interactions (a fridge looks different when its door is open). We develop novel representations including (1) temporal pyramids, which generalize the well-known spatial pyramid to approximate temporal correspondence when scoring a model and (2) composite object models that exploit the fact that objects look different when being interacted with. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation and demonstrate that our novel representations produce a two-fold improvement over traditional approaches. Our analysis suggests that real-world ADL recognition is “all about the objects,” and in particular, “all about the objects being interacted with.”
  @cite_13: Reasoning about objects and their affordances is a fundamental problem for visual intelligence. Most of the previous work casts this problem as a classification task where separate classifiers are trained to label objects, recognize attributes, or assign affordances. In this work, we consider the problem of object affordance reasoning using a knowledge base representation. Diverse information of objects are first harvested from images and other meta-data sources. We then learn a knowledge base (KB) using a Markov Logic Network (MLN). Given the learned KB, we show that a diverse set of visual inference tasks can be done in this unified framework without training separate classifiers, including zero-shot affordance prediction and object recognition given human poses.
  @cite_25: We present a video summarization approach for egocentric or "wearable" camera data. Given hours of video, the proposed method produces a compact storyboard summary of the camera wearer's day. In contrast to traditional keyframe selection techniques, the resulting summary focuses on the most important objects and people with which the camera wearer interacts. To accomplish this, we develop region cues indicative of high-level saliency in egocentric video--such as the nearness to hands, gaze, and frequency of occurrence--and learn a regressor to predict the relative importance of any new region based on these cues. Using these predictions and a simple form of temporal event detection, our method selects frames for the storyboard that reflect the key object-driven happenings. We adjust the compactness of the final summary given either an importance selection criterion or a length budget; for the latter, we design an efficient dynamic programming solution that accounts for importance, visual uniqueness, and temporal displacement. Critically, the approach is neither camera-wearer-specific nor object-specific; that means the learned importance metric need not be trained for a given user or context, and it can predict the importance of objects and people that have never been seen previously. Our results on two egocentric video datasets show the method's promise relative to existing techniques for saliency and summarization.
summary: Unlike other methods, which rely on object detectors @cite_21 , or hand and skin segmentation @cite_13 @cite_25 , we propose EgoObject representation that is based solely on shape, location, size and depth cues in an egocentric RGBD images. We demonstrate that we can use our representation successfully to predict 3D saliency in egocentric RGBD images.