Anticipating Next Active Objects for Egocentric Videos

Active objects are those in contact with the first person in an egocentric video. This paper addresses the challenge of anticipating the future location of the next active object in relation to a person within a given egocentric video clip, which is challenging since the contact is poised to happen after the last observed frame by the model, even before any action takes place. As we aim to estimate the position of objects, this problem is particularly hard in a scenario where the observed clip and the action segment are separated by the so-called time-to-contact segment. We term this task Anticipating the Next ACTive Object (ANACTO) and introduce a transformer-based self-attention framework to tackle it. We compare our model with the existing anticipation-based methods to establish relevant baseline methods, where our approach outperforms all of them on three major egocentric datasets: EpicKitchens-100, EGTEA+, and Ego4D. We also conduct an ablation study to better present the effectiveness of the proposed and baseline methods on varying conditions. The code as well as the ANACTO task annotations for the aforementioned first two datasets will be made available upon the acceptance of this paper.