arXiv subjects

Giovanni Maria Farinella

Publications and source records attributed to Giovanni Maria Farinella.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Ego-METAS: Egocentric online Multimodal Energy-efficient Temporal Action Segmentation benchmark

To operate in the physical world, embodied agents must perceive their environment in an "always-on" fashion, selectively accessing the most informative sensors to balance energy constraints and task accuracy. Despite its importance for resource-constrained devices, energy-aware perception remains under-explored, with most prior work assuming unlimited compute. To address this, we introduce Ego-METAS: the first Egocentric online Multimodal Energy-efficient Temporal Action Segmentation benchmark. Ego-METAS provides a unified testbed of more than 100 hours of untrimmed egocentric video from EgoExo4D, CMU-MMAC, and CaptainCook4D, spanning 5 modalities (RGB, audio, gaze, IMU, and monochrome camera). We formulate an online temporal action segmentation task where models must dynamically select which sensors to activate at each timestep while strictly adhering to hardware-representative energy budgets. Alongside the benchmark, we release unified splits, cleaned annotations, pre-extracted features, and a diverse suite of baseline routing policies. Our evaluations show that optimal routing is highly scenario-dependent, and that existing policy-learning methods, designed primarily for trimmed clips, struggle to adapt to continuous, untrimmed environments. However, even simple dynamic fusion of complementary modalities (e.g., via random routing) proves critical for balancing predictive accuracy against strict energy budgets. Ultimately, Ego-METAS provides a standardized foundation to develop robust, cost-aware policies for autonomous, always-on embodied AI.

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arXiv2026

EgoInteract: Synthetic Egocentric Videos Generation for Interaction Understanding and Anticipation

Collecting large-scale egocentric video datasets with dense spatial and temporal annotations is costly, slow, and often constrained by environmental biases, privacy constraints, and limited coverage of interaction patterns. While synthetic data has shown strong potential in several vision domains, its use for egocentric perception remains relatively underexplored, especially for tasks requiring temporally coherent human-object interactions. In this work, we introduce EgoInteract, a controllable simulator for egocentric video generation designed to model fine-grained egocentric interactions and their temporal dynamics. The simulator enables precise control over camera, human body and hand motion, object manipulation, and scene composition across diverse environments. Building on this framework, we generate a synthetic egocentric video dataset with dense spatial and temporal annotations for temporal action segmentation, next-active object detection, interaction anticipation, and hand-object interaction detection. We evaluate models trained with simulated data on multiple real-world egocentric benchmarks spanning diverse environments, object categories, and interaction patterns. Results show consistent improvements over strong baselines across tasks and datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and transferability of our simulation-based approach.

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arXiv2026

Leveraging Gaze and Set-of-Mark in VLLMs for Human-Object Interaction Anticipation from Egocentric Videos

The ability to anticipate human-object interactions is highly desirable in an intelligent assistive system in order to guide users during daily life activities and understand their short and long-term goals. Creating systems with such capabilities requires to approach several complex challenges. This work addresses the problem of human-object interaction anticipation in Egocentric Vision using Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). We tackle key limitations in existing approaches by improving visual grounding capabilities through Set-of-Mark prompting and understanding user intent via the trajectory formed by the user's most recent gaze fixations. To effectively capture the temporal dynamics immediately preceding the interaction, we further introduce a novel inverse exponential sampling strategy for input video frames. Experiments conducted on the egocentric dataset HD-EPIC demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for the considered task, showing its model-agnostic nature.

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arXiv2026

Leveraging Synthetic Data for Enhancing Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection

In this work, we explore the role of synthetic data in improving the detection of Hand-Object Interactions from egocentric images. Through extensive experimentation and comparative analysis on VISOR, EgoHOS, and ENIGMA-51 datasets, our findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic data to significantly improve HOI detection, particularly when real labeled data are scarce or unavailable. By using synthetic data and only 10% of the real labeled data, we achieve improvements in Overall AP over models trained exclusively on real data, with gains of +5.67% on VISOR, +8.24% on EgoHOS, and +11.69% on ENIGMA-51. Furthermore, we systematically study how aligning synthetic data to specific real-world benchmarks with respect to objects, grasps, and environments, showing that the effectiveness of synthetic data consistently improves with better synthetic-real alignment. As a result of this work, we release a new data generation pipeline and the new HOI-Synth benchmark, which augments existing datasets with synthetic images of hand-object interaction. These data are automatically annotated with hand-object contact states, bounding boxes, and pixel-wise segmentation masks. All data, code, and tools for synthetic data generation are available at: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/HOI-Synth/.

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arXiv2026

ENIGMA-360: An Ego-Exo Dataset for Human Behavior Understanding in Industrial Scenarios

Understanding human behavior from complementary egocentric (ego) and exocentric (exo) points of view enables the development of systems that can support workers in industrial environments and enhance their safety. However, progress in this area is hindered by the lack of datasets capturing both views in realistic industrial scenarios. To address this gap, we propose ENIGMA-360, a new ego-exo dataset acquired in a real industrial scenario. The dataset is composed of 180 egocentric and 180 exocentric procedural videos temporally synchronized offering complementary information of the same scene. The 360 videos have been labeled with temporal and spatial annotations, enabling the study of different aspects of human behavior in industrial domain. We provide baseline experiments for 3 foundational tasks for human behavior understanding: 1) Temporal Action Segmentation, 2) Keystep Recognition and 3) Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection, showing the limits of state-of-the-art approaches on this challenging scenario. These results highlight the need for new models capable of robust ego-exo understanding in real-world environments. We publicly release the dataset and its annotations at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ENIGMA-360/.

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arXiv2026

ProSkill: Segment-Level Skill Assessment in Procedural Videos

Skill assessment in procedural videos is crucial for the objective evaluation of human performance in settings such as manufacturing and procedural daily tasks. Current research on skill assessment has predominantly focused on sports and lacks large-scale datasets for complex procedural activities. Existing studies typically involve only a limited number of actions, focus on either pairwise assessments (e.g., A is better than B) or on binary labels (e.g., good execution vs needs improvement). In response to these shortcomings, we introduce ProSkill, the first benchmark dataset for action-level skill assessment in procedural tasks. ProSkill provides absolute skill assessment annotations, along with pairwise ones. This is enabled by a novel and scalable annotation protocol that allows for the creation of an absolute skill assessment ranking starting from pairwise assessments. This protocol leverages a Swiss Tournament scheme for efficient pairwise comparisons, which are then aggregated into consistent, continuous global scores using an ELO-based rating system. We use our dataset to benchmark the main state-of-the-art skill assessment algorithms, including both ranking-based and pairwise paradigms. The suboptimal results achieved by the current state-of-the-art highlight the challenges and thus the value of ProSkill in the context of skill assessment for procedural videos. All data and code are available at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ProSkill/

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arXiv2026

GlovEgo-HOI: Bridging the Synthetic-to-Real Gap for Industrial Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection

Egocentric Human-Object Interaction (EHOI) analysis is crucial for industrial safety, yet the development of robust models is hindered by the scarcity of annotated domain-specific data. We address this challenge by introducing a data generation framework that combines synthetic data with a diffusion-based process to augment real-world images with realistic Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). We present GlovEgo-HOI, a new benchmark dataset for industrial EHOI, and GlovEgo-Net, a model integrating Glove-Head and Keypoint- Head modules to leverage hand pose information for enhanced interaction detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed data generation framework and GlovEgo-Net. To foster further research, we release the GlovEgo-HOI dataset, augmentation pipeline, and pre-trained models at: GitHub project.

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arXiv2026

TI-PREGO: Chain of Thought and In-Context Learning for Online Mistake Detection in PRocedural EGOcentric Videos

Identifying procedural errors online from egocentric videos is a critical yet challenging task across various domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, and skill-based training. The nature of such mistakes is inherently open-set, as unforeseen or novel errors may occur, necessitating robust detection systems that do not rely on prior examples of failure. Currently, however, no technique effectively detects open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose a dual branch architecture to address this problem in an online fashion: one branch continuously performs step recognition from the input egocentric video, while the other anticipates future steps based on the recognition module's output. Mistakes are detected as mismatches between the currently recognized action and the action predicted by the anticipation module. The recognition branch takes input frames, predicts the current action, and aggregates frame-level results into action tokens. The anticipation branch, specifically, leverages the solid pattern-matching capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict action tokens based on previously predicted ones. Given the online nature of the task, we also thoroughly benchmark the difficulties associated with per-frame evaluations, particularly the need for accurate and timely predictions in dynamic online scenarios. Extensive experiments on two procedural datasets demonstrate the challenges and opportunities of leveraging a dual-branch architecture for mistake detection, showcasing the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In a thorough evaluation including recognition and anticipation variants and state-of-the-art models, our method reveals its robustness and effectiveness in online applications.

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arXiv2025

Online Episodic Memory Visual Query Localization with Egocentric Streaming Object Memory

Episodic memory retrieval enables wearable cameras to recall objects or events previously observed in video. However, existing formulations assume an "offline" setting with full video access at query time, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios with power and storage-constrained wearable devices. Towards more application-ready episodic memory systems, we introduce Online Visual Query 2D (OVQ2D), a task where models process video streams online, observing each frame only once, and retrieve object localizations using a compact memory instead of full video history. We address OVQ2D with ESOM (Egocentric Streaming Object Memory), a novel framework integrating an object discovery module, an object tracking module, and a memory module that find, track, and store spatio-temporal object information for efficient querying. Experiments on Ego4D demonstrate ESOM's superiority over other online approaches, though OVQ2D remains challenging, with top performance at only ~4% success. ESOM's accuracy increases markedly with perfect object tracking (31.91%), discovery (40.55%), or both (81.92%), underscoring the need of applied research on these components.

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arXiv2025

SignIT: A Comprehensive Dataset and Multimodal Analysis for Italian Sign Language Recognition

In this work we present SignIT, a new dataset to study the task of Italian Sign Language (LIS) recognition. The dataset is composed of 644 videos covering 3.33 hours. We manually annotated videos considering a taxonomy of 94 distinct sign classes belonging to 5 macro-categories: Animals, Food, Colors, Emotions and Family. We also extracted 2D keypoints related to the hands, face and body of the users. With the dataset, we propose a benchmark for the sign recognition task, adopting several state-of-the-art models showing how temporal information, 2D keypoints and RGB frames can be influence the performance of these models. Results show the limitations of these models on this challenging LIS dataset. We release data and annotations at the following link: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/SignIT/.

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arXiv2025

Ego-EXTRA: video-language Egocentric Dataset for EXpert-TRAinee assistance

We present Ego-EXTRA, a video-language Egocentric Dataset for EXpert-TRAinee assistance. Ego-EXTRA features 50 hours of unscripted egocentric videos of subjects performing procedural activities (the trainees) while guided by real-world experts who provide guidance and answer specific questions using natural language. Following a ``Wizard of OZ'' data collection paradigm, the expert enacts a wearable intelligent assistant, looking at the activities performed by the trainee exclusively from their egocentric point of view, answering questions when asked by the trainee, or proactively interacting with suggestions during the procedures. This unique data collection protocol enables Ego-EXTRA to capture a high-quality dialogue in which expert-level feedback is provided to the trainee. Two-way dialogues between experts and trainees are recorded, transcribed, and used to create a novel benchmark comprising more than 15k high-quality Visual Question Answer sets, which we use to evaluate Multimodal Large Language Models. The results show that Ego-EXTRA is challenging and highlight the limitations of current models when used to provide expert-level assistance to the user. The Ego-EXTRA dataset is publicly available to support the benchmark of egocentric video-language assistants: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/Ego-EXTRA/.

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arXiv2025

A Real-Time System for Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection in Industrial Domains

Hand-object interaction detection remains an open challenge in real-time applications, where intuitive user experiences depend on fast and accurate detection of interactions with surrounding objects. We propose an efficient approach for detecting hand-objects interactions from streaming egocentric vision that operates in real time. Our approach consists of an action recognition module and an object detection module for identifying active objects upon confirmed interaction. Our Mamba model with EfficientNetV2 as backbone for action recognition achieves 38.52% p-AP on the ENIGMA-51 benchmark at 30fps, while our fine-tuned YOLOWorld reaches 85.13% AP for hand and object. We implement our models in a cascaded architecture where the action recognition and object detection modules operate sequentially. When the action recognition predicts a contact state, it activates the object detection module, which in turn performs inference on the relevant frame to detect and classify the active object.

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arXiv2025

Learning Egocentric In-Hand Object Segmentation through Weak Supervision from Human Narrations

Pixel-level recognition of objects manipulated by the user from egocentric images enables key applications spanning assistive technologies, industrial safety, and activity monitoring. However, progress in this area is currently hindered by the scarcity of annotated datasets, as existing approaches rely on costly manual labels. In this paper, we propose to learn human-object interaction detection leveraging narrations $\unicode{x2013}$ natural language descriptions of the actions performed by the camera wearer which contain clues about manipulated objects. We introduce Narration-Supervised in-Hand Object Segmentation (NS-iHOS), a novel task where models have to learn to segment in-hand objects by learning from natural-language narrations in a weakly-supervised regime. Narrations are then not employed at inference time. We showcase the potential of the task by proposing Weakly-Supervised In-hand Object Segmentation from Human Narrations (WISH), an end-to-end model distilling knowledge from narrations to learn plausible hand-object associations and enable in-hand object segmentation without using narrations at test time. We benchmark WISH against different baselines based on open-vocabulary object detectors and vision-language models. Experiments on EPIC-Kitchens and Ego4D show that WISH surpasses all baselines, recovering more than 50% of the performance of fully supervised methods, without employing fine-grained pixel-wise annotations. Code and data can be found at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/WISH.

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arXiv2025

Semantically Guided Action Anticipation

Unsupervised domain adaptation remains a critical challenge in enabling the knowledge transfer of models across unseen domains. Existing methods struggle to balance the need for domain-invariant representations with preserving domain-specific features, which is often due to alignment approaches that impose the projection of samples with similar semantics close in the latent space despite their drastic domain differences. We introduce a novel approach that shifts the focus from aligning representations in absolute coordinates to aligning the relative positioning of equivalent concepts in latent spaces. Our method defines a domain-agnostic structure upon the semantic/geometric relationships between class labels in language space and guides adaptation, ensuring that the organization of samples in visual space reflects reference inter-class relationships while preserving domain-specific characteristics. We empirically demonstrate our method's superiority in domain adaptation tasks across four diverse image and video datasets. Remarkably, we surpass previous works in 18 different adaptation scenarios across four diverse image and video datasets with average accuracy improvements of +3.32% on DomainNet, +5.75% in GeoPlaces, +4.77% on GeoImnet, and +1.94% mean class accuracy improvement on EgoExo4D.

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arXiv2025

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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arXiv2025

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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arXiv2025

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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arXiv2025

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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