IEEE ICPRS 2024

Opportunities in Egocentric Video Understanding

Forecasting the rise of wearable devices equipped with audio-visual feeds, this talk will present opportunities for research in egocentric video understanding. This talk aims to argue for a fine(r)-grained perspective onto human-object interactions, from video sequences, captured in an egocentric perspective (i.e. first-person footage). I will argue for the need to tackle new approaches of supervision [CVPR 2023, ongoing], object transformations [NeurIPS 2022, ongoing], domain adaptation [ICCV 2023], modalities [ICASSP 2023] and reconstruction [NeurIPS 2023] as we attempt to learn from longer videos captured in an unscripted manner.

Dima Damen is a Professor of Computer Vision at the University of Bristol and Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Dima is currently an EPSRC Fellow (2020-2025), focusing her research interests in the automatic understanding of object interactions, actions and activities using wearable visual (and depth) sensors. She is best known for her leading works in Egocentric Vision, and has also contributed to novel research questions including mono-to-3D, video object segmentation, assessing action completion, domain adaptation, skill/expertise determination from video sequences, discovering task-relevant objects, dual-domain and dual-time learning as well as multi-modal fusion using vision, audio and language.

She is the project lead for EPIC-KITCHENS, the leading dataset in egocentric vision, with accompanying open challenges and follow-up works: EPIC-Sounds, VISOR and EPIC Fields. She is part of the large-scale consortium effort Ego4D and Ego-Exo4D. Dima is associate editor of IJCV and IEEE TPAMI, and was a program chair for ICCV 2021. She is frequently an Area Chair in major conferences and was selected as Outstanding Reviewer in CVPR2021, CVPR2020, ICCV2017, CVPR2013 and CVPR2012. Dima received her PhD from the University of Leeds (2009), joined the University of Bristol as a Postdoctoral Researcher (2010-2012), Assistant Professor (2013-2018), Associate Professor (2018-2021) and was appointed as chair in August 2021. She supervises 10 PhD students, 4 Visiting PhD students and 2 postdoctoral researchers.

At the University of Bristol, Dima leads the Machine Learning and Computer Vision (MaVi) lab, and is the university chair of the Research Data Storage Management Executive Board.

At Google DeepMind, Dima is part of the Vision team, led by Andrew Zisserman, focusing on video understanding research. Her latest contribution is to the Perception Test project on measuring perception in AI models