Semantic fovea: real-time annotation of ego-centric videos with gaze context

Abstract

Visual context plays a crucial role in understanding human visual attention in natural, unconstrained tasks - the objects we look at during everyday tasks provide an indicator of our ongoing attention. Collection, interpretation, and study of visual behaviour in unconstrained environments therefore is necessary, however presents many challenges, requiring painstaking hand-coding. Here we demonstrate a proof-of-concept system that enables real-time annotation of objects in an egocentric video stream from head-mounted eye-tracking glasses. We concurrently obtain a live stream of user gaze vectors with respect to their own visual field. Even during dynamic, fast-paced interactions, our system was able to recognise all objects in the user's field-of-view with moderate accuracy. To validate our concept, our system was used to annotate an in-lab breakfast scenario in real time.