Temporal Segmentation and Activity Classification from First-person Sensing

Temporal segmentation of human motion into actions is central to the understanding and building of computational models of human motion and activity recognition. Several issues contribute to the challenge of temporal segmentation and classification of human motion. These include the large variability in the temporal scale and periodicity of human actions, the complexity of representing articulated motion, and the exponential nature of all possible movement combinations. We provide initial results from investigating two distinct problems - classification of the overall task being performed, and the more difficult problem of classifying individual frames over time into specific actions. We explore first-person sensing through a wearable camera and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) for temporally segmenting human motion into actions and performing activity classification in the context of cooking and recipe preparation in a natural environment. We present baseline results for supervised and unsupervised temporal segmentation, and recipe recognition in the CMU-Multimodal activity database (CMU-MMAC).