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Antonino Furnari

Publications and source records attributed to Antonino Furnari.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

EASG-Bench: Video Q&A Benchmark with Egocentric Action Scene Graphs

We introduce EASG-Bench, a question-answering benchmark for egocentric videos where the question-answering pairs are created from spatio-temporally grounded dynamic scene graphs capturing intricate relationships among actors, actions, and objects. We propose a systematic evaluation framework and evaluate several language-only and video large language models (video-LLMs) on this benchmark. We observe a performance gap in language-only and video-LLMs, especially on questions focusing on temporal ordering, thus identifying a research gap in the area of long-context video understanding. To promote the reproducibility of our findings and facilitate further research, the benchmark and accompanying code are available at the following GitHub page: https://github.com/fpv-iplab/EASG-bench.

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Mamba-OTR: a Mamba-based Solution for Online Take and Release Detection from Untrimmed Egocentric Video

This work tackles the problem of Online detection of Take and Release (OTR) of an object in untrimmed egocentric videos. This task is challenging due to severe label imbalance, with temporally sparse positive annotations, and the need for precise temporal predictions. Furthermore, methods need to be computationally efficient in order to be deployed in real-world online settings. To address these challenges, we propose Mamba-OTR, a model based on the Mamba architecture. Mamba-OTR is designed to exploit temporal recurrence during inference while being trained on short video clips. To address label imbalance, our training pipeline incorporates the focal loss and a novel regularization scheme that aligns model predictions with the evaluation metric. Extensive experiments on EPIC-KITCHENS-100, the comparisons with transformer-based approach, and the evaluation of different training and test schemes demonstrate the superiority of Mamba-OTR in both accuracy and efficiency. These finding are particularly evident when evaluating full-length videos or high frame-rate sequences, even when trained on short video snippets for computational convenience. The proposed Mamba-OTR achieves a noteworthy mp-mAP of 45.48 when operating in a sliding-window fashion, and 43.35 in streaming mode, versus the 20.32 of a vanilla transformer and 25.16 of a vanilla Mamba, thus providing a strong baseline for OTR. We will publicly release the source code of Mamba-OTR to support future research.

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Gazing Into Missteps: Leveraging Eye-Gaze for Unsupervised Mistake Detection in Egocentric Videos of Skilled Human Activities

We address the challenge of unsupervised mistake detection in egocentric video of skilled human activities through the analysis of gaze signals. While traditional methods rely on manually labeled mistakes, our approach does not require mistake annotations, hence overcoming the need of domain-specific labeled data. Based on the observation that eye movements closely follow object manipulation activities, we assess to what extent eye-gaze signals can support mistake detection, proposing to identify deviations in attention patterns measured through a gaze tracker with respect to those estimated by a gaze prediction model. Since predicting gaze in video is characterized by high uncertainty, we propose a novel gaze completion task, where eye fixations are predicted from visual observations and partial gaze trajectories, and contribute a novel gaze completion approach which explicitly models correlations between gaze information and local visual tokens. Inconsistencies between predicted and observed gaze trajectories act as an indicator to identify mistakes. Experiments highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in different settings, with relative gains up to +14%, +11%, and +5% in EPIC-Tent, HoloAssist and IndustReal respectively, remarkably matching results of supervised approaches without seeing any labels. We further show that gaze-based analysis is particularly useful in the presence of skilled actions, low action execution confidence, and actions requiring hand-eye coordination and object manipulation skills. Our method is ranked first on the HoloAssist Mistake Detection challenge.

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Efficient Calisthenics Skills Classification through Foreground Instance Selection and Depth Estimation

Calisthenics skill classification is the computer vision task of inferring the skill performed by an athlete from images, enabling automatic performance assessment and personalized analytics. Traditional methods for calisthenics skill recognition are based on pose estimation methods to determine the position of skeletal data from images, which is later fed to a classification algorithm to infer the performed skill. Despite the progress in human pose estimation algorithms, they still involve high computational costs, long inference times, and complex setups, which limit the applicability of such approaches in real-time applications or mobile devices. This work proposes a direct approach to calisthenics skill recognition, which leverages depth estimation and athlete patch retrieval to avoid the computationally expensive human pose estimation module. Using Depth Anything V2 for depth estimation and YOLOv10 for athlete localization, we segment the subject from the background rather than relying on traditional pose estimation techniques. This strategy increases efficiency, reduces inference time, and improves classification accuracy. Our approach significantly outperforms skeleton-based methods, achieving 38.3x faster inference with RGB image patches and improved classification accuracy with depth patches (0.837 vs. 0.815). Beyond these performance gains, the modular design of our pipeline allows for flexible replacement of components, enabling future enhancements and adaptation to real-world applications.

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Calisthenics Skills Temporal Video Segmentation

Calisthenics is a fast-growing bodyweight discipline that consists of different categories, one of which is focused on skills. Skills in calisthenics encompass both static and dynamic elements performed by athletes. The evaluation of static skills is based on their difficulty level and the duration of the hold. Automated tools able to recognize isometric skills from a video by segmenting them to estimate their duration would be desirable to assist athletes in their training and judges during competitions. Although the video understanding literature on action recognition through body pose analysis is rich, no previous work has specifically addressed the problem of calisthenics skill temporal video segmentation. This study aims to provide an initial step towards the implementation of automated tools within the field of Calisthenics. To advance knowledge in this context, we propose a dataset of video footage of static calisthenics skills performed by athletes. Each video is annotated with a temporal segmentation which determines the extent of each skill. We hence report the results of a baseline approach to address the problem of skill temporal segmentation on the proposed dataset. The results highlight the feasibility of the proposed problem, while there is still room for improvement.

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How Far Can Off-the-Shelf Multimodal Large Language Models Go in Online Episodic Memory Question Answering?

We investigate whether off-the-shelf Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can tackle Online Episodic-Memory Video Question Answering (OEM-VQA) without additional training. Our pipeline converts a streaming egocentric video into a lightweight textual memory, only a few kilobytes per minute, via an MLLM descriptor module, and answers multiple-choice questions by querying this memory with an LLM reasoner module. On the QAEgo4D-Closed benchmark, our best configuration attains 56.0% accuracy with 3.6 kB per minute storage, matching the performance of dedicated state-of-the-art systems while being 10**4/10**5 times more memory-efficient. Extensive ablations provides insights into the role of each component and design choice, and highlight directions of improvement for future research.

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Task Graph Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Procedural Activity Understanding in Egocentric Videos

We introduce a gradient-based approach for learning task graphs from procedural activities, improving over hand-crafted methods. Our method directly optimizes edge weights via maximum likelihood, enabling integration into neural architectures. We validate our approach on CaptainCook4D, EgoPER, and EgoProceL, achieving +14.5%, +10.2%, and +13.6% F1-score improvements. Our feature-based approach for predicting task graphs from textual/video embeddings demonstrates emerging video understanding abilities. We also achieved top performance on the procedure understanding benchmark on Ego-Exo4D and significantly improved online mistake detection (+19.8% on Assembly101-O, +6.4% on EPIC-Tent-O). Code: https://github.com/fpv-iplab/Differentiable-Task-Graph-Learning.

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Differentiable Task Graph Learning: Procedural Activity Representation and Online Mistake Detection from Egocentric Videos

Procedural activities are sequences of key-steps aimed at achieving specific goals. They are crucial to build intelligent agents able to assist users effectively. In this context, task graphs have emerged as a human-understandable representation of procedural activities, encoding a partial ordering over the key-steps. While previous works generally relied on hand-crafted procedures to extract task graphs from videos, in this paper, we propose an approach based on direct maximum likelihood optimization of edges' weights, which allows gradient-based learning of task graphs and can be naturally plugged into neural network architectures. Experiments on the CaptainCook4D dataset demonstrate the ability of our approach to predict accurate task graphs from the observation of action sequences, with an improvement of +16.7% over previous approaches. Owing to the differentiability of the proposed framework, we also introduce a feature-based approach, aiming to predict task graphs from key-step textual or video embeddings, for which we observe emerging video understanding abilities. Task graphs learned with our approach are also shown to significantly enhance online mistake detection in procedural egocentric videos, achieving notable gains of +19.8% and +7.5% on the Assembly101-O and EPIC-Tent-O datasets. Code for replicating experiments is available at https://github.com/fpv-iplab/Differentiable-Task-Graph-Learning.

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Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives

We present Ego-Exo4D, a diverse, large-scale multimodal multiview video dataset and benchmark challenge. Ego-Exo4D centers around simultaneously-captured egocentric and exocentric video of skilled human activities (e.g., sports, music, dance, bike repair). 740 participants from 13 cities worldwide performed these activities in 123 different natural scene contexts, yielding long-form captures from 1 to 42 minutes each and 1,286 hours of video combined. The multimodal nature of the dataset is unprecedented: the video is accompanied by multichannel audio, eye gaze, 3D point clouds, camera poses, IMU, and multiple paired language descriptions -- including a novel "expert commentary" done by coaches and teachers and tailored to the skilled-activity domain. To push the frontier of first-person video understanding of skilled human activity, we also present a suite of benchmark tasks and their annotations, including fine-grained activity understanding, proficiency estimation, cross-view translation, and 3D hand/body pose. All resources are open sourced to fuel new research in the community. Project page: http://ego-exo4d-data.org/

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Synchronization is All You Need: Exocentric-to-Egocentric Transfer for Temporal Action Segmentation with Unlabeled Synchronized Video Pairs

We consider the problem of transferring a temporal action segmentation system initially designed for exocentric (fixed) cameras to an egocentric scenario, where wearable cameras capture video data. The conventional supervised approach requires the collection and labeling of a new set of egocentric videos to adapt the model, which is costly and time-consuming. Instead, we propose a novel methodology which performs the adaptation leveraging existing labeled exocentric videos and a new set of unlabeled, synchronized exocentric-egocentric video pairs, for which temporal action segmentation annotations do not need to be collected. We implement the proposed methodology with an approach based on knowledge distillation, which we investigate both at the feature and Temporal Action Segmentation model level. Experiments on Assembly101 and EgoExo4D demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against classic unsupervised domain adaptation and temporal alignment approaches. Without bells and whistles, our best model performs on par with supervised approaches trained on labeled egocentric data, without ever seeing a single egocentric label, achieving a +15.99 improvement in the edit score (28.59 vs 12.60) on the Assembly101 dataset compared to a baseline model trained solely on exocentric data. In similar settings, our method also improves edit score by +3.32 on the challenging EgoExo4D benchmark. Code is available here: https://github.com/fpv-iplab/synchronization-is-all-you-need.

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Are Synthetic Data Useful for Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection?

In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of synthetic data in enhancing egocentric hand-object interaction detection. Via extensive experiments and comparative analyses on three egocentric datasets, VISOR, EgoHOS, and ENIGMA-51, our findings reveal how to exploit synthetic data for the HOI detection task when real labeled data are scarce or unavailable. Specifically, by leveraging only 10% of real labeled data, we achieve improvements in Overall AP compared to baselines trained exclusively on real data of: +5.67% on EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR, +8.24% on EgoHOS, and +11.69% on ENIGMA-51. Our analysis is supported by a novel data generation pipeline and the newly introduced HOI-Synth benchmark which augments existing datasets with synthetic images of hand-object interactions automatically labeled with hand-object contact states, bounding boxes, and pixel-wise segmentation masks. Data, code, and data generation tools to support future research are released at: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/HOI-Synth/.

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AFF-ttention! Affordances and Attention models for Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation

Short-Term object-interaction Anticipation consists of detecting the location of the next-active objects, the noun and verb categories of the interaction, and the time to contact from the observation of egocentric video. This ability is fundamental for wearable assistants or human robot interaction to understand the user goals, but there is still room for improvement to perform STA in a precise and reliable way. In this work, we improve the performance of STA predictions with two contributions: 1. We propose STAformer, a novel attention-based architecture integrating frame guided temporal pooling, dual image-video attention, and multiscale feature fusion to support STA predictions from an image-input video pair. 2. We introduce two novel modules to ground STA predictions on human behavior by modeling affordances.First, we integrate an environment affordance model which acts as a persistent memory of interactions that can take place in a given physical scene. Second, we predict interaction hotspots from the observation of hands and object trajectories, increasing confidence in STA predictions localized around the hotspot. Our results show significant relative Overall Top-5 mAP improvements of up to +45% on Ego4D and +42% on a novel set of curated EPIC-Kitchens STA labels. We will release the code, annotations, and pre extracted affordances on Ego4D and EPIC- Kitchens to encourage future research in this area.

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PREGO: online mistake detection in PRocedural EGOcentric videos

Promptly identifying procedural errors from egocentric videos in an online setting is highly challenging and valuable for detecting mistakes as soon as they happen. This capability has a wide range of applications across various fields, such as manufacturing and healthcare. The nature of procedural mistakes is open-set since novel types of failures might occur, which calls for one-class classifiers trained on correctly executed procedures. However, no technique can currently detect open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose PREGO, the first online one-class classification model for mistake detection in PRocedural EGOcentric videos. PREGO is based on an online action recognition component to model the current action, and a symbolic reasoning module to predict the next actions. Mistake detection is performed by comparing the recognized current action with the expected future one. We evaluate PREGO on two procedural egocentric video datasets, Assembly101 and Epic-tent, which we adapt for online benchmarking of procedural mistake detection to establish suitable benchmarks, thus defining the Assembly101-O and Epic-tent-O datasets, respectively.

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StillFast: An End-to-End Approach for Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation

Anticipation problem has been studied considering different aspects such as predicting humans' locations, predicting hands and objects trajectories, and forecasting actions and human-object interactions. In this paper, we studied the short-term object interaction anticipation problem from the egocentric point of view, proposing a new end-to-end architecture named StillFast. Our approach simultaneously processes a still image and a video detecting and localizing next-active objects, predicting the verb which describes the future interaction and determining when the interaction will start. Experiments on the large-scale egocentric dataset EGO4D show that our method outperformed state-of-the-art approaches on the considered task. Our method is ranked first in the public leaderboard of the EGO4D short term object interaction anticipation challenge 2022. Please see the project web page for code and additional details: https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/stillfast/.

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Exploiting Multimodal Synthetic Data for Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection in an Industrial Scenario

In this paper, we tackle the problem of Egocentric Human-Object Interaction (EHOI) detection in an industrial setting. To overcome the lack of public datasets in this context, we propose a pipeline and a tool for generating synthetic images of EHOIs paired with several annotations and data signals (e.g., depth maps or segmentation masks). Using the proposed pipeline, we present EgoISM-HOI a new multimodal dataset composed of synthetic EHOI images in an industrial environment with rich annotations of hands and objects. To demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of synthetic EHOI data produced by the proposed tool, we designed a new method that predicts and combines different multimodal signals to detect EHOIs in RGB images. Our study shows that exploiting synthetic data to pre-train the proposed method significantly improves performance when tested on real-world data. Moreover, to fully understand the usefulness of our method, we conducted an in-depth analysis in which we compared and highlighted the superiority of the proposed approach over different state-of-the-art class-agnostic methods. To support research in this field, we publicly release the datasets, source code, and pre-trained models at https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/egoism-hoi.

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An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision

What will the future be? We wonder! In this survey, we explore the gap between current research in egocentric vision and the ever-anticipated future, where wearable computing, with outward facing cameras and digital overlays, is expected to be integrated in our every day lives. To understand this gap, the article starts by envisaging the future through character-based stories, showcasing through examples the limitations of current technology. We then provide a mapping between this future and previously defined research tasks. For each task, we survey its seminal works, current state-of-the-art methodologies and available datasets, then reflect on shortcomings that limit its applicability to future research. Note that this survey focuses on software models for egocentric vision, independent of any specific hardware. The paper concludes with recommendations for areas of immediate explorations so as to unlock our path to the future always-on, personalised and life-enhancing egocentric vision.

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Action Scene Graphs for Long-Form Understanding of Egocentric Videos

We present Egocentric Action Scene Graphs (EASGs), a new representation for long-form understanding of egocentric videos. EASGs extend standard manually-annotated representations of egocentric videos, such as verb-noun action labels, by providing a temporally evolving graph-based description of the actions performed by the camera wearer, including interacted objects, their relationships, and how actions unfold in time. Through a novel annotation procedure, we extend the Ego4D dataset by adding manually labeled Egocentric Action Scene Graphs offering a rich set of annotations designed for long-from egocentric video understanding. We hence define the EASG generation task and provide a baseline approach, establishing preliminary benchmarks. Experiments on two downstream tasks, egocentric action anticipation and egocentric activity summarization, highlight the effectiveness of EASGs for long-form egocentric video understanding. We will release the dataset and the code to replicate experiments and annotations.

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ENIGMA-51: Towards a Fine-Grained Understanding of Human-Object Interactions in Industrial Scenarios

ENIGMA-51 is a new egocentric dataset acquired in an industrial scenario by 19 subjects who followed instructions to complete the repair of electrical boards using industrial tools (e.g., electric screwdriver) and equipments (e.g., oscilloscope). The 51 egocentric video sequences are densely annotated with a rich set of labels that enable the systematic study of human behavior in the industrial domain. We provide benchmarks on four tasks related to human behavior: 1) untrimmed temporal detection of human-object interactions, 2) egocentric human-object interaction detection, 3) short-term object interaction anticipation and 4) natural language understanding of intents and entities. Baseline results show that the ENIGMA-51 dataset poses a challenging benchmark to study human behavior in industrial scenarios. We publicly release the dataset at https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/ENIGMA-51.

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