A fine-grained perspective onto object interactions

GRAND Seminar Tuesday, May 22, 1:30 PM, Room: 4801

Dima Damen
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor)
Computer Vision
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Host:

Zoran Duric

Abstract:

This talk aims to argue for a fine-grained perspective onto human-object interactions, from video sequences. I will present approaches for the understanding of ‘what’ objects one interacts with during daily activities, ‘how’ these objects have been used, ‘when’ should we label the temporal boundaries of interactions, ‘which’ semantic labels one can use to describe such interactions and ‘who’ is better when contrasting people perform the same interaction.

I will present works on novel sub-topics related to: (1) assessing action ‘completion’ – when an interaction is attempted but not completed, (2) determining skill or expertise from video sequences and (3) finding unequivocal representations for object interactions. Proposed methods include supervised, weakly-supervised and unsupervised approaches.

I will also introduce EPIC-KITCHENS 2018, the recently released largest dataset of object interactions in people’s homes, recorded using wearable cameras. The dataset includes 11.5M frames fully annotated with objects and actions, based on unique annotations from the participants narrating their own videos, thus reflecting true intention. http://epic-kitchens.github.io

Short Bio:

Dima Damen: Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Vision at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Received her PhD from the University of Leeds (2009). Dima's research interests are in the automatic understanding of object interactions, actions and activities using static and wearable visual (and depth) sensors. Dima co-chaired BMVC 2013, is area chair for BMVC (2014-2018), associate editor of Pattern Recognition (2017-). She was selected as a Nokia Research collaborator in 2016, and as an Outstanding Reviewer in ICCV17, CVPR13 and CVPR12. Dima currently supervises 9 PhD students, and 3 postdoctoral researchers.

Further info at: http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~damen/