Interactive Prototype Learning for Egocentric Action Recognition

Egocentric video recognition is a challenging task that requires to identify both the actor’s motion and the active object that the actor interacts with. Recognizing the active object is particularly hard due to the cluttered background with distracting objects, the frequent field of view changes, severe occlusion, etc. To improve the active object classification, most existing methods use object detectors or human gaze information, which are computationally expensive or require labor-intensive annotations. To avoid these additional costs, we propose an end-to-end Interactive Prototype Learning (IPL) framework to learn better active object representations by leveraging the motion cues from the actor. First, we introduce a set of verb prototypes to disentangle active object features from distracting object features. Each prototype corresponds to a primary motion pattern of an egocentric action, offering a distinctive supervision signal for active object feature learning. Second, we design two interactive operations to enable the extraction of active object features, i.e., noun-to-verb assignment and verb-to-noun selection. These operations are parameter-efficient and can learn judicious location-aware features on top of 3D CNN backbones. We demonstrate that the IPL framework can generalize to different backbones and outperform the state-of-the-art on three large-scale egocentric video datasets, i.e., EPIC-KITCHENS-55, EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and EGTEA.