Datasets on object manipulation and interaction: a survey
---
paper_title: Recognizing Fine-Grained and Composite Activities Using Hand-Centric Features and Script Data

paper_content:

Activity recognition has shown impressive progress in recent years. However, the challenges of detecting fine-grained activities and understanding how they are combined into composite activities have been largely overlooked. In this work we approach both tasks and present a dataset which provides detailed annotations to address them. The first challenge is to detect fine-grained activities, which are defined by low inter-class variability and are typically characterized by fine-grained body motions. We explore how human pose and hands can help to approach this challenge by comparing two pose-based and two hand-centric features with state-of-the-art holistic features. To attack the second challenge, recognizing composite activities, we leverage the fact that these activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. We show the benefits of our hand-centric approach for fine-grained activity classification and detection. For composite activity recognition we find that decomposition into attributes allows sharing information across composites and is essential to attack this hard task. Using script data we can recognize novel composites without having training data for them.
---
paper_title: Script data for attribute-based recognition of composite activities

paper_content:

State-of-the-art human activity recognition methods build on discriminative learning which requires a representative training set for good performance. This leads to scalability issues for the recognition of large sets of highly diverse activities. In this paper we leverage the fact that many human activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. To share and transfer knowledge between composite activities we model them by a common set of attributes corresponding to basic actions and object participants. This attribute representation allows to incorporate script data that delivers new variations of a composite activity or even to unseen composite activities. In our experiments on 41 composite cooking tasks, we found that script data to successfully capture the high variability of composite activities. We show improvements in a supervised case where training data for all composite cooking tasks is available, but we are also able to recognize unseen composites by just using script data and without any manual video annotation.
---
paper_title: Learning to Recognize Daily Actions using Gaze

paper_content:

We present a probabilistic generative model for simultaneously recognizing daily actions and predicting gaze locations in videos recorded from an egocentric camera. We focus on activities requiring eye-hand coordination and model the spatio-temporal relationship between the gaze point, the scene objects, and the action label. Our model captures the fact that the distribution of both visual features and object occurrences in the vicinity of the gaze point is correlated with the verb-object pair describing the action. It explicitly incorporates known properties of gaze behavior from the psychology literature, such as the temporal delay between fixation and manipulation events. We present an inference method that can predict the best sequence of gaze locations and the associated action label from an input sequence of images. We demonstrate improvements in action recognition rates and gaze prediction accuracy relative to state-of-the-art methods, on two new datasets that contain egocentric videos of daily activities and gaze.
---
paper_title: Human Activity Detection from RGBD Images

paper_content:

Being able to detect and recognize human activities is important for making personal assistant robots useful in performing assistive tasks. The challenge is to develop a system that is low-cost, reliable in unstructured home settings, and also straightforward to use. In this paper, we use a RGBD sensor (Microsoft Kinect) as the input sensor, and present learning algorithms to infer the activities. Our algorithm is based on a hierarchical maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM). It considers a person's activity as composed of a set of sub-activities, and infers the two-layered graph structure using a dynamic programming approach. We test our algorithm on detecting and recognizing twelve different activities performed by four people in different environments, such as a kitchen, a living room, an office, etc., and achieve an average performance of 84.3% when the person was seen before in the training set (and 64.2% when the person was not seen before).
---
paper_title: Learning human activities and object affordances from RGB-D videos

paper_content:

Understanding human activities and object affordances are two very important skills, especially for personal robots which operate in human environments. In this work, we consider the problem of extracting a descriptive labeling of the sequence of sub-activities being performed by a human, and more importantly, of their interactions with the objects in the form of associated affordances. Given a RGB-D video, we jointly model the human activities and object affordances as a Markov random field where the nodes represent objects and sub-activities, and the edges represent the relationships between object affordances, their relations with sub-activities, and their evolution over time. We formulate the learning problem using a structural support vector machine (SSVM) approach, where labelings over various alternate temporal segmentations are considered as latent variables. We tested our method on a challenging dataset comprising 120 activity videos collected from 4 subjects, and obtained an accuracy of 79.4% for affordance, 63.4% for sub-activity and 75.0% for high-level activity labeling. We then demonstrate the use of such descriptive labeling in performing assistive tasks by a PR2 robot.
---
paper_title: Slice&Dice: Recognizing Food Preparation Activities Using Embedded Accelerometers

paper_content:

Within the context of an endeavor to provide situated support for people with cognitive impairments in the kitchen, we developed and evaluated classifiers for recognizing 11 actions involved in food preparation. Data was collected from 20 lay subjects using four specially designed kitchen utensils incorporating embedded 3-axis accelerometers. Subjects were asked to prepare a mixed salad in our laboratory-based instrumented kitchen environment. Video of each subject's food preparation activities were independently annotated by three different coders. Several classifiers were trained and tested using these features. With an overall accuracy of 82.9% our investigation demonstrated that a broad set of food preparation actions can be reliably recognized using sensors embedded in kitchen utensils.
---
paper_title: Slice&Dice: Recognizing Food Preparation Activities Using Embedded Accelerometers

paper_content:

Within the context of an endeavor to provide situated support for people with cognitive impairments in the kitchen, we developed and evaluated classifiers for recognizing 11 actions involved in food preparation. Data was collected from 20 lay subjects using four specially designed kitchen utensils incorporating embedded 3-axis accelerometers. Subjects were asked to prepare a mixed salad in our laboratory-based instrumented kitchen environment. Video of each subject's food preparation activities were independently annotated by three different coders. Several classifiers were trained and tested using these features. With an overall accuracy of 82.9% our investigation demonstrated that a broad set of food preparation actions can be reliably recognized using sensors embedded in kitchen utensils.
---
paper_title: Learning to Recognize Daily Actions using Gaze

paper_content:

We present a probabilistic generative model for simultaneously recognizing daily actions and predicting gaze locations in videos recorded from an egocentric camera. We focus on activities requiring eye-hand coordination and model the spatio-temporal relationship between the gaze point, the scene objects, and the action label. Our model captures the fact that the distribution of both visual features and object occurrences in the vicinity of the gaze point is correlated with the verb-object pair describing the action. It explicitly incorporates known properties of gaze behavior from the psychology literature, such as the temporal delay between fixation and manipulation events. We present an inference method that can predict the best sequence of gaze locations and the associated action label from an input sequence of images. We demonstrate improvements in action recognition rates and gaze prediction accuracy relative to state-of-the-art methods, on two new datasets that contain egocentric videos of daily activities and gaze.
---
paper_title: Recognizing Fine-Grained and Composite Activities Using Hand-Centric Features and Script Data

paper_content:

Activity recognition has shown impressive progress in recent years. However, the challenges of detecting fine-grained activities and understanding how they are combined into composite activities have been largely overlooked. In this work we approach both tasks and present a dataset which provides detailed annotations to address them. The first challenge is to detect fine-grained activities, which are defined by low inter-class variability and are typically characterized by fine-grained body motions. We explore how human pose and hands can help to approach this challenge by comparing two pose-based and two hand-centric features with state-of-the-art holistic features. To attack the second challenge, recognizing composite activities, we leverage the fact that these activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. We show the benefits of our hand-centric approach for fine-grained activity classification and detection. For composite activity recognition we find that decomposition into attributes allows sharing information across composites and is essential to attack this hard task. Using script data we can recognize novel composites without having training data for them.
---
paper_title: Script data for attribute-based recognition of composite activities

paper_content:

State-of-the-art human activity recognition methods build on discriminative learning which requires a representative training set for good performance. This leads to scalability issues for the recognition of large sets of highly diverse activities. In this paper we leverage the fact that many human activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. To share and transfer knowledge between composite activities we model them by a common set of attributes corresponding to basic actions and object participants. This attribute representation allows to incorporate script data that delivers new variations of a composite activity or even to unseen composite activities. In our experiments on 41 composite cooking tasks, we found that script data to successfully capture the high variability of composite activities. We show improvements in a supervised case where training data for all composite cooking tasks is available, but we are also able to recognize unseen composites by just using script data and without any manual video annotation.
---
paper_title: The Language of Actions: Recovering the Syntax and Semantics of Goal-Directed Human Activities

paper_content:

This paper describes a framework for modeling human activities as temporally structured processes. Our approach is motivated by the inherently hierarchical nature of human activities and the close correspondence between human actions and speech: We model action units using Hidden Markov Models, much like words in speech. These action units then form the building blocks to model complex human activities as sentences using an action grammar. To evaluate our approach, we collected a large dataset of daily cooking activities: The dataset includes a total of 52 participants, each performing a total of 10 cooking activities in multiple real-life kitchens, resulting in over 77 hours of video footage. We evaluate the HTK toolkit, a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine, in combination with multiple video feature descriptors, for both the recognition of cooking activities (e.g., making pancakes) as well as the semantic parsing of videos into action units (e.g., cracking eggs). Our results demonstrate the benefits of structured temporal generative approaches over existing discriminative approaches in coping with the complexity of human daily life activities.
---
paper_title: A database for fine grained activity detection of cooking activities

paper_content:

While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.
---
paper_title: Combining embedded accelerometers with computer vision for recognizing food preparation activities

paper_content:

This paper introduces a publicly available dataset of complex activities that involve manipulative gestures. The dataset captures people preparing mixed salads and contains more than 4.5 hours of accelerometer and RGB-D video data, detailed annotations, and an evaluation protocol for comparison of activity recognition algorithms. Providing baseline results for one possible activity recognition task, this paper further investigates modality fusion methods at different stages of the recognition pipeline: (i) prior to feature extraction through accelerometer localization, (ii) at feature level via feature concatenation, and (iii) at classification level by combining classifier outputs. Empirical evaluation shows that fusing information captured by these sensor types can considerably improve recognition performance.
---
paper_title: Slice&Dice: Recognizing Food Preparation Activities Using Embedded Accelerometers

paper_content:

Within the context of an endeavor to provide situated support for people with cognitive impairments in the kitchen, we developed and evaluated classifiers for recognizing 11 actions involved in food preparation. Data was collected from 20 lay subjects using four specially designed kitchen utensils incorporating embedded 3-axis accelerometers. Subjects were asked to prepare a mixed salad in our laboratory-based instrumented kitchen environment. Video of each subject's food preparation activities were independently annotated by three different coders. Several classifiers were trained and tested using these features. With an overall accuracy of 82.9% our investigation demonstrated that a broad set of food preparation actions can be reliably recognized using sensors embedded in kitchen utensils.
---
paper_title: Kitchen Scene Context Based Gesture Recognition: A Contest in ICPR2012

paper_content:

This paper introduces a new open dataset "Actions for Cooking Eggs ACE Dataset" and summarizes results of the contest on "Kitchen Scene Context based Gesture Recognition", in conjunction with ICPR2012. The dataset consists of naturally performed actions in a kitchen environment. Five kinds of cooking menus were actually performed by five different actors, and the cooking actions were recorded by a Kinect Sensor. Color image sequences and depth image sequences are both available. Besides, action label was given to each frame. To estimate the action label, action recognition method has to analyze not only actor's action, but also scene contexts such as ingredients and cooking utensils. We compare the submitted algorithms and the results in this paper.
---
paper_title: Audio-visual classification and detection of human manipulation actions

paper_content:

This thesis builds on the observation that robots cannot be programmed to handle any possible situation in the world. Like humans, they need mechanisms to deal with previously unseen situations and unknown objects. One of the skills humans rely on to deal with the unknown is the ability to learn by observing others. This thesis addresses the challenge of enabling a robot to learn from a human instructor. In particular, it is focused on objects. How can a robot find previously unseen objects? How can it track the object with its gaze? How can the object be employed in activities? Throughout this thesis, these questions are addressed with the end goal of allowing a robot to observe a human instructor and learn how to perform an activity. The robot is assumed to know very little about the world and it is supposed to discover objects autonomously. Given a visual input, object hypotheses are formulated by leveraging on common contextual knowledge often used by humans (e.g. gravity, compactness, convexity). Moreover, unknown objects are tracked and their appearance is updated over time since only a small fraction of the object is visible from the robot initially. Finally, object functionality is inferred by looking how the human instructor is manipulating objects and how objects are used in relation to others. All the methods included in this thesis have been evaluated on datasets that are publicly available or that we collected, showing the importance of these learning abilities.
---
paper_title: The Language of Actions: Recovering the Syntax and Semantics of Goal-Directed Human Activities

paper_content:

This paper describes a framework for modeling human activities as temporally structured processes. Our approach is motivated by the inherently hierarchical nature of human activities and the close correspondence between human actions and speech: We model action units using Hidden Markov Models, much like words in speech. These action units then form the building blocks to model complex human activities as sentences using an action grammar. To evaluate our approach, we collected a large dataset of daily cooking activities: The dataset includes a total of 52 participants, each performing a total of 10 cooking activities in multiple real-life kitchens, resulting in over 77 hours of video footage. We evaluate the HTK toolkit, a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine, in combination with multiple video feature descriptors, for both the recognition of cooking activities (e.g., making pancakes) as well as the semantic parsing of videos into action units (e.g., cracking eggs). Our results demonstrate the benefits of structured temporal generative approaches over existing discriminative approaches in coping with the complexity of human daily life activities.
---
paper_title: The TUM Kitchen Data Set of everyday manipulation activities for motion tracking and action recognition

paper_content:

We introduce the publicly available TUM Kitchen Data Set as a comprehensive collection of activity sequences recorded in a kitchen environment equipped with multiple complementary sensors. The recorded data consists of observations of naturally performed manipulation tasks as encountered in everyday activities of human life. Several instances of a table-setting task were performed by different subjects, involving the manipulation of objects and the environment. We provide the original video sequences, full-body motion capture data recorded by a markerless motion tracker, RFID tag readings and magnetic sensor readings from objects and the environment, as well as corresponding action labels. In this paper, we both describe how the data was computed, in particular the motion tracker and the labeling, and give examples what it can be used for. We present first results of an automatic method for segmenting the observed motions into semantic classes, and describe how the data can be integrated in a knowledge-based framework for reasoning about the observations.
---
paper_title: Recognizing Fine-Grained and Composite Activities Using Hand-Centric Features and Script Data

paper_content:

Activity recognition has shown impressive progress in recent years. However, the challenges of detecting fine-grained activities and understanding how they are combined into composite activities have been largely overlooked. In this work we approach both tasks and present a dataset which provides detailed annotations to address them. The first challenge is to detect fine-grained activities, which are defined by low inter-class variability and are typically characterized by fine-grained body motions. We explore how human pose and hands can help to approach this challenge by comparing two pose-based and two hand-centric features with state-of-the-art holistic features. To attack the second challenge, recognizing composite activities, we leverage the fact that these activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. We show the benefits of our hand-centric approach for fine-grained activity classification and detection. For composite activity recognition we find that decomposition into attributes allows sharing information across composites and is essential to attack this hard task. Using script data we can recognize novel composites without having training data for them.
---
paper_title: The Language of Actions: Recovering the Syntax and Semantics of Goal-Directed Human Activities

paper_content:

This paper describes a framework for modeling human activities as temporally structured processes. Our approach is motivated by the inherently hierarchical nature of human activities and the close correspondence between human actions and speech: We model action units using Hidden Markov Models, much like words in speech. These action units then form the building blocks to model complex human activities as sentences using an action grammar. To evaluate our approach, we collected a large dataset of daily cooking activities: The dataset includes a total of 52 participants, each performing a total of 10 cooking activities in multiple real-life kitchens, resulting in over 77 hours of video footage. We evaluate the HTK toolkit, a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine, in combination with multiple video feature descriptors, for both the recognition of cooking activities (e.g., making pancakes) as well as the semantic parsing of videos into action units (e.g., cracking eggs). Our results demonstrate the benefits of structured temporal generative approaches over existing discriminative approaches in coping with the complexity of human daily life activities.
---
paper_title: A database for fine grained activity detection of cooking activities

paper_content:

While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.
---
paper_title: Activity recognition using the velocity histories of tracked keypoints

paper_content:

We present an activity recognition feature inspired by human psychophysical performance. This feature is based on the velocity history of tracked keypoints. We present a generative mixture model for video sequences using this feature, and show that it performs comparably to local spatio-temporal features on the KTH activity recognition dataset. In addition, we contribute a new activity recognition dataset, focusing on activities of daily living, with high resolution video sequences of complex actions. We demonstrate the superiority of our velocity history feature on high resolution video sequences of complicated activities. Further, we show how the velocity history feature can be extended, both with a more sophisticated latent velocity model, and by combining the velocity history feature with other useful information, like appearance, position, and high level semantic information. Our approach performs comparably to established and state of the art methods on the KTH dataset, and significantly outperforms all other methods on our challenging new dataset.
---
paper_title: The TUM Kitchen Data Set of everyday manipulation activities for motion tracking and action recognition

paper_content:

We introduce the publicly available TUM Kitchen Data Set as a comprehensive collection of activity sequences recorded in a kitchen environment equipped with multiple complementary sensors. The recorded data consists of observations of naturally performed manipulation tasks as encountered in everyday activities of human life. Several instances of a table-setting task were performed by different subjects, involving the manipulation of objects and the environment. We provide the original video sequences, full-body motion capture data recorded by a markerless motion tracker, RFID tag readings and magnetic sensor readings from objects and the environment, as well as corresponding action labels. In this paper, we both describe how the data was computed, in particular the motion tracker and the labeling, and give examples what it can be used for. We present first results of an automatic method for segmenting the observed motions into semantic classes, and describe how the data can be integrated in a knowledge-based framework for reasoning about the observations.
---
paper_title: Combining embedded accelerometers with computer vision for recognizing food preparation activities

paper_content:

This paper introduces a publicly available dataset of complex activities that involve manipulative gestures. The dataset captures people preparing mixed salads and contains more than 4.5 hours of accelerometer and RGB-D video data, detailed annotations, and an evaluation protocol for comparison of activity recognition algorithms. Providing baseline results for one possible activity recognition task, this paper further investigates modality fusion methods at different stages of the recognition pipeline: (i) prior to feature extraction through accelerometer localization, (ii) at feature level via feature concatenation, and (iii) at classification level by combining classifier outputs. Empirical evaluation shows that fusing information captured by these sensor types can considerably improve recognition performance.
---
paper_title: Human Activity Detection from RGBD Images

paper_content:

Being able to detect and recognize human activities is important for making personal assistant robots useful in performing assistive tasks. The challenge is to develop a system that is low-cost, reliable in unstructured home settings, and also straightforward to use. In this paper, we use a RGBD sensor (Microsoft Kinect) as the input sensor, and present learning algorithms to infer the activities. Our algorithm is based on a hierarchical maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM). It considers a person's activity as composed of a set of sub-activities, and infers the two-layered graph structure using a dynamic programming approach. We test our algorithm on detecting and recognizing twelve different activities performed by four people in different environments, such as a kitchen, a living room, an office, etc., and achieve an average performance of 84.3% when the person was seen before in the training set (and 64.2% when the person was not seen before).
---
paper_title: Learning human activities and object affordances from RGB-D videos

paper_content:

Understanding human activities and object affordances are two very important skills, especially for personal robots which operate in human environments. In this work, we consider the problem of extracting a descriptive labeling of the sequence of sub-activities being performed by a human, and more importantly, of their interactions with the objects in the form of associated affordances. Given a RGB-D video, we jointly model the human activities and object affordances as a Markov random field where the nodes represent objects and sub-activities, and the edges represent the relationships between object affordances, their relations with sub-activities, and their evolution over time. We formulate the learning problem using a structural support vector machine (SSVM) approach, where labelings over various alternate temporal segmentations are considered as latent variables. We tested our method on a challenging dataset comprising 120 activity videos collected from 4 subjects, and obtained an accuracy of 79.4% for affordance, 63.4% for sub-activity and 75.0% for high-level activity labeling. We then demonstrate the use of such descriptive labeling in performing assistive tasks by a PR2 robot.
---
paper_title: Learning to Recognize Daily Actions using Gaze

paper_content:

We present a probabilistic generative model for simultaneously recognizing daily actions and predicting gaze locations in videos recorded from an egocentric camera. We focus on activities requiring eye-hand coordination and model the spatio-temporal relationship between the gaze point, the scene objects, and the action label. Our model captures the fact that the distribution of both visual features and object occurrences in the vicinity of the gaze point is correlated with the verb-object pair describing the action. It explicitly incorporates known properties of gaze behavior from the psychology literature, such as the temporal delay between fixation and manipulation events. We present an inference method that can predict the best sequence of gaze locations and the associated action label from an input sequence of images. We demonstrate improvements in action recognition rates and gaze prediction accuracy relative to state-of-the-art methods, on two new datasets that contain egocentric videos of daily activities and gaze.
---
paper_title: Detecting activities of daily living in first-person camera views

paper_content:

We present a novel dataset and novel algorithms for the problem of detecting activities of daily living (ADL) in firstperson camera views. We have collected a dataset of 1 million frames of dozens of people performing unscripted, everyday activities. The dataset is annotated with activities, object tracks, hand positions, and interaction events. ADLs differ from typical actions in that they can involve long-scale temporal structure (making tea can take a few minutes) and complex object interactions (a fridge looks different when its door is open). We develop novel representations including (1) temporal pyramids, which generalize the well-known spatial pyramid to approximate temporal correspondence when scoring a model and (2) composite object models that exploit the fact that objects look different when being interacted with. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation and demonstrate that our novel representations produce a two-fold improvement over traditional approaches. Our analysis suggests that real-world ADL recognition is “all about the objects,” and in particular, “all about the objects being interacted with.”
---
paper_title: A public domain dataset for ADL recognition using wrist-placed accelerometers

paper_content:

The automatic monitoring of specific Activities of Daily Living (ADL) can be a useful tool for Human-Robot Interaction in smart environments and Assistive Robotics applications. The qualitative definition that is given for most ADL and the lack of well-defined benchmarks, however, are obstacles toward the identification of the most effective monitoring approaches for different tasks. The contribution of the article is two-fold: (i) we propose a taxonomy of ADL allowing for their categorization with respect to the most suitable monitoring approach; (ii) we present a freely available dataset of acceleration data, coming from a wrist-worn wearable device, targeting the recognition of 14 different human activities.
---
paper_title: The Yale human grasping dataset: Grasp, object, and task data in household and machine shop environments

paper_content:

This paper presents a dataset of human grasping behavior in unstructured environments. Wide-angle head-mounted camera video was recorded from two housekeepers and two machinists during their regular work activities, and the grasp types, objects, and tasks were analyzed and coded by study staff. The full dataset contains 27.7 hours of tagged video and represents a wide range of manipulative behaviors spanning much of the typical human hand usage. We provide the original videos, a spreadsheet including the tagged grasp type, object, and task parameters, time information for each successive grasp, and video screenshots for each instance. Example code is provided for MATLAB and R, demonstrating how to load in the dataset and produce simple plots.
---
paper_title: The TUM Kitchen Data Set of everyday manipulation activities for motion tracking and action recognition

paper_content:

We introduce the publicly available TUM Kitchen Data Set as a comprehensive collection of activity sequences recorded in a kitchen environment equipped with multiple complementary sensors. The recorded data consists of observations of naturally performed manipulation tasks as encountered in everyday activities of human life. Several instances of a table-setting task were performed by different subjects, involving the manipulation of objects and the environment. We provide the original video sequences, full-body motion capture data recorded by a markerless motion tracker, RFID tag readings and magnetic sensor readings from objects and the environment, as well as corresponding action labels. In this paper, we both describe how the data was computed, in particular the motion tracker and the labeling, and give examples what it can be used for. We present first results of an automatic method for segmenting the observed motions into semantic classes, and describe how the data can be integrated in a knowledge-based framework for reasoning about the observations.
---
paper_title: Human Activity Detection from RGBD Images

paper_content:

Being able to detect and recognize human activities is important for making personal assistant robots useful in performing assistive tasks. The challenge is to develop a system that is low-cost, reliable in unstructured home settings, and also straightforward to use. In this paper, we use a RGBD sensor (Microsoft Kinect) as the input sensor, and present learning algorithms to infer the activities. Our algorithm is based on a hierarchical maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM). It considers a person's activity as composed of a set of sub-activities, and infers the two-layered graph structure using a dynamic programming approach. We test our algorithm on detecting and recognizing twelve different activities performed by four people in different environments, such as a kitchen, a living room, an office, etc., and achieve an average performance of 84.3% when the person was seen before in the training set (and 64.2% when the person was not seen before).
---
paper_title: Learning human activities and object affordances from RGB-D videos

paper_content:

Understanding human activities and object affordances are two very important skills, especially for personal robots which operate in human environments. In this work, we consider the problem of extracting a descriptive labeling of the sequence of sub-activities being performed by a human, and more importantly, of their interactions with the objects in the form of associated affordances. Given a RGB-D video, we jointly model the human activities and object affordances as a Markov random field where the nodes represent objects and sub-activities, and the edges represent the relationships between object affordances, their relations with sub-activities, and their evolution over time. We formulate the learning problem using a structural support vector machine (SSVM) approach, where labelings over various alternate temporal segmentations are considered as latent variables. We tested our method on a challenging dataset comprising 120 activity videos collected from 4 subjects, and obtained an accuracy of 79.4% for affordance, 63.4% for sub-activity and 75.0% for high-level activity labeling. We then demonstrate the use of such descriptive labeling in performing assistive tasks by a PR2 robot.
---
paper_title: A public domain dataset for ADL recognition using wrist-placed accelerometers

paper_content:

The automatic monitoring of specific Activities of Daily Living (ADL) can be a useful tool for Human-Robot Interaction in smart environments and Assistive Robotics applications. The qualitative definition that is given for most ADL and the lack of well-defined benchmarks, however, are obstacles toward the identification of the most effective monitoring approaches for different tasks. The contribution of the article is two-fold: (i) we propose a taxonomy of ADL allowing for their categorization with respect to the most suitable monitoring approach; (ii) we present a freely available dataset of acceleration data, coming from a wrist-worn wearable device, targeting the recognition of 14 different human activities.
---
paper_title: Kitchen Scene Context Based Gesture Recognition: A Contest in ICPR2012

paper_content:

This paper introduces a new open dataset "Actions for Cooking Eggs ACE Dataset" and summarizes results of the contest on "Kitchen Scene Context based Gesture Recognition", in conjunction with ICPR2012. The dataset consists of naturally performed actions in a kitchen environment. Five kinds of cooking menus were actually performed by five different actors, and the cooking actions were recorded by a Kinect Sensor. Color image sequences and depth image sequences are both available. Besides, action label was given to each frame. To estimate the action label, action recognition method has to analyze not only actor's action, but also scene contexts such as ingredients and cooking utensils. We compare the submitted algorithms and the results in this paper.
---
paper_title: UCF101: A Dataset of 101 Human Actions Classes From Videos in The Wild

paper_content:

We introduce UCF101 which is currently the largest dataset of human actions. It consists of 101 action classes, over 13k clips and 27 hours of video data. The database consists of realistic user uploaded videos containing camera motion and cluttered background. Additionally, we provide baseline action recognition results on this new dataset using standard bag of words approach with overall performance of 44.5%. To the best of our knowledge, UCF101 is currently the most challenging dataset of actions due to its large number of classes, large number of clips and also unconstrained nature of such clips.
---
paper_title: Recognizing Fine-Grained and Composite Activities Using Hand-Centric Features and Script Data

paper_content:

Activity recognition has shown impressive progress in recent years. However, the challenges of detecting fine-grained activities and understanding how they are combined into composite activities have been largely overlooked. In this work we approach both tasks and present a dataset which provides detailed annotations to address them. The first challenge is to detect fine-grained activities, which are defined by low inter-class variability and are typically characterized by fine-grained body motions. We explore how human pose and hands can help to approach this challenge by comparing two pose-based and two hand-centric features with state-of-the-art holistic features. To attack the second challenge, recognizing composite activities, we leverage the fact that these activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. We show the benefits of our hand-centric approach for fine-grained activity classification and detection. For composite activity recognition we find that decomposition into attributes allows sharing information across composites and is essential to attack this hard task. Using script data we can recognize novel composites without having training data for them.
---
paper_title: The Yale human grasping dataset: Grasp, object, and task data in household and machine shop environments

paper_content:

This paper presents a dataset of human grasping behavior in unstructured environments. Wide-angle head-mounted camera video was recorded from two housekeepers and two machinists during their regular work activities, and the grasp types, objects, and tasks were analyzed and coded by study staff. The full dataset contains 27.7 hours of tagged video and represents a wide range of manipulative behaviors spanning much of the typical human hand usage. We provide the original videos, a spreadsheet including the tagged grasp type, object, and task parameters, time information for each successive grasp, and video screenshots for each instance. Example code is provided for MATLAB and R, demonstrating how to load in the dataset and produce simple plots.
---
paper_title: The YCB object and Model set: Towards common benchmarks for manipulation research

paper_content:

In this paper we present the Yale-CMU-Berkeley (YCB) Object and Model set, intended to be used for benchmarking in robotic grasping and manipulation research. The objects in the set are designed to cover various aspects of the manipulation problem; it includes objects of daily life with different shapes, sizes, textures, weight and rigidity, as well as some widely used manipulation tests. The associated database provides high-resolution RGBD scans, physical properties and geometric models of the objects for easy incorporation into manipulation and planning software platforms. A comprehensive literature survey on existing benchmarks and object datasets is also presented and their scope and limitations are discussed. The set will be freely distributed to research groups worldwide at a series of tutorials at robotics conferences, and will be otherwise available at a reasonable purchase cost.
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paper_title: Robot programming by demonstration

paper_content:

The presented paper shows a pilot development of a robot ‘task programming method’. In this method, the user programs the robot task by demonstrating it (Programming by Demonstration, PbD). PbD is applied on a robotic arm with two degrees-of-freedom for programming a constrained motion task.
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paper_title: The TUM Kitchen Data Set of everyday manipulation activities for motion tracking and action recognition

paper_content:

We introduce the publicly available TUM Kitchen Data Set as a comprehensive collection of activity sequences recorded in a kitchen environment equipped with multiple complementary sensors. The recorded data consists of observations of naturally performed manipulation tasks as encountered in everyday activities of human life. Several instances of a table-setting task were performed by different subjects, involving the manipulation of objects and the environment. We provide the original video sequences, full-body motion capture data recorded by a markerless motion tracker, RFID tag readings and magnetic sensor readings from objects and the environment, as well as corresponding action labels. In this paper, we both describe how the data was computed, in particular the motion tracker and the labeling, and give examples what it can be used for. We present first results of an automatic method for segmenting the observed motions into semantic classes, and describe how the data can be integrated in a knowledge-based framework for reasoning about the observations.
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paper_title: Script data for attribute-based recognition of composite activities

paper_content:

State-of-the-art human activity recognition methods build on discriminative learning which requires a representative training set for good performance. This leads to scalability issues for the recognition of large sets of highly diverse activities. In this paper we leverage the fact that many human activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. To share and transfer knowledge between composite activities we model them by a common set of attributes corresponding to basic actions and object participants. This attribute representation allows to incorporate script data that delivers new variations of a composite activity or even to unseen composite activities. In our experiments on 41 composite cooking tasks, we found that script data to successfully capture the high variability of composite activities. We show improvements in a supervised case where training data for all composite cooking tasks is available, but we are also able to recognize unseen composites by just using script data and without any manual video annotation.
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paper_title: Learning to Recognize Daily Actions using Gaze

paper_content:

We present a probabilistic generative model for simultaneously recognizing daily actions and predicting gaze locations in videos recorded from an egocentric camera. We focus on activities requiring eye-hand coordination and model the spatio-temporal relationship between the gaze point, the scene objects, and the action label. Our model captures the fact that the distribution of both visual features and object occurrences in the vicinity of the gaze point is correlated with the verb-object pair describing the action. It explicitly incorporates known properties of gaze behavior from the psychology literature, such as the temporal delay between fixation and manipulation events. We present an inference method that can predict the best sequence of gaze locations and the associated action label from an input sequence of images. We demonstrate improvements in action recognition rates and gaze prediction accuracy relative to state-of-the-art methods, on two new datasets that contain egocentric videos of daily activities and gaze.
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paper_title: The Language of Actions: Recovering the Syntax and Semantics of Goal-Directed Human Activities

paper_content:

This paper describes a framework for modeling human activities as temporally structured processes. Our approach is motivated by the inherently hierarchical nature of human activities and the close correspondence between human actions and speech: We model action units using Hidden Markov Models, much like words in speech. These action units then form the building blocks to model complex human activities as sentences using an action grammar. To evaluate our approach, we collected a large dataset of daily cooking activities: The dataset includes a total of 52 participants, each performing a total of 10 cooking activities in multiple real-life kitchens, resulting in over 77 hours of video footage. We evaluate the HTK toolkit, a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine, in combination with multiple video feature descriptors, for both the recognition of cooking activities (e.g., making pancakes) as well as the semantic parsing of videos into action units (e.g., cracking eggs). Our results demonstrate the benefits of structured temporal generative approaches over existing discriminative approaches in coping with the complexity of human daily life activities.
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paper_title: A database for fine grained activity detection of cooking activities

paper_content:

While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.
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paper_title: Detecting activities of daily living in first-person camera views

paper_content:

We present a novel dataset and novel algorithms for the problem of detecting activities of daily living (ADL) in firstperson camera views. We have collected a dataset of 1 million frames of dozens of people performing unscripted, everyday activities. The dataset is annotated with activities, object tracks, hand positions, and interaction events. ADLs differ from typical actions in that they can involve long-scale temporal structure (making tea can take a few minutes) and complex object interactions (a fridge looks different when its door is open). We develop novel representations including (1) temporal pyramids, which generalize the well-known spatial pyramid to approximate temporal correspondence when scoring a model and (2) composite object models that exploit the fact that objects look different when being interacted with. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation and demonstrate that our novel representations produce a two-fold improvement over traditional approaches. Our analysis suggests that real-world ADL recognition is “all about the objects,” and in particular, “all about the objects being interacted with.”
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paper_title: Discovery of activity patterns using topic models

paper_content:

In this work we propose a novel method to recognize daily routines as a probabilistic combination of activity patterns. The use of topic models enables the automatic discovery of such patterns in a user's daily routine. We report experimental results that show the ability of the approach to model and recognize daily routines without user annotation.
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paper_title: BigBIRD: A large-scale 3D database of object instances

paper_content:

The state of the art in computer vision has rapidly advanced over the past decade largely aided by shared image datasets. However, most of these datasets tend to consist of assorted collections of images from the web that do not include 3D information or pose information. Furthermore, they target the problem of object category recognition—whereas solving the problem of object instance recognition might be sufficient for many robotic tasks. To address these issues, we present a highquality, large-scale dataset of 3D object instances, with accurate calibration information for every image. We anticipate that “solving” this dataset will effectively remove many perceptionrelated problems for mobile, sensing-based robots. The contributions of this work consist of: (1) BigBIRD, a dataset of 100 objects (and growing), composed of, for each object, 600 3D point clouds and 600 high-resolution (12 MP) images spanning all views, (2) a method for jointly calibrating a multi-camera system, (3) details of our data collection system, which collects all required data for a single object in under 6 minutes with minimal human effort, and (4) multiple software components (made available in open source), used to automate multi-sensor calibration and the data collection process. All code and data are available at http://rll.eecs.berkeley.edu/bigbird.
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paper_title: Human Activity Detection from RGBD Images

paper_content:

Being able to detect and recognize human activities is important for making personal assistant robots useful in performing assistive tasks. The challenge is to develop a system that is low-cost, reliable in unstructured home settings, and also straightforward to use. In this paper, we use a RGBD sensor (Microsoft Kinect) as the input sensor, and present learning algorithms to infer the activities. Our algorithm is based on a hierarchical maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM). It considers a person's activity as composed of a set of sub-activities, and infers the two-layered graph structure using a dynamic programming approach. We test our algorithm on detecting and recognizing twelve different activities performed by four people in different environments, such as a kitchen, a living room, an office, etc., and achieve an average performance of 84.3% when the person was seen before in the training set (and 64.2% when the person was not seen before).
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paper_title: Activity recognition using the velocity histories of tracked keypoints

paper_content:

We present an activity recognition feature inspired by human psychophysical performance. This feature is based on the velocity history of tracked keypoints. We present a generative mixture model for video sequences using this feature, and show that it performs comparably to local spatio-temporal features on the KTH activity recognition dataset. In addition, we contribute a new activity recognition dataset, focusing on activities of daily living, with high resolution video sequences of complex actions. We demonstrate the superiority of our velocity history feature on high resolution video sequences of complicated activities. Further, we show how the velocity history feature can be extended, both with a more sophisticated latent velocity model, and by combining the velocity history feature with other useful information, like appearance, position, and high level semantic information. Our approach performs comparably to established and state of the art methods on the KTH dataset, and significantly outperforms all other methods on our challenging new dataset.
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paper_title: Learning human activities and object affordances from RGB-D videos

paper_content:

Understanding human activities and object affordances are two very important skills, especially for personal robots which operate in human environments. In this work, we consider the problem of extracting a descriptive labeling of the sequence of sub-activities being performed by a human, and more importantly, of their interactions with the objects in the form of associated affordances. Given a RGB-D video, we jointly model the human activities and object affordances as a Markov random field where the nodes represent objects and sub-activities, and the edges represent the relationships between object affordances, their relations with sub-activities, and their evolution over time. We formulate the learning problem using a structural support vector machine (SSVM) approach, where labelings over various alternate temporal segmentations are considered as latent variables. We tested our method on a challenging dataset comprising 120 activity videos collected from 4 subjects, and obtained an accuracy of 79.4% for affordance, 63.4% for sub-activity and 75.0% for high-level activity labeling. We then demonstrate the use of such descriptive labeling in performing assistive tasks by a PR2 robot.
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paper_title: Combining embedded accelerometers with computer vision for recognizing food preparation activities

paper_content:

This paper introduces a publicly available dataset of complex activities that involve manipulative gestures. The dataset captures people preparing mixed salads and contains more than 4.5 hours of accelerometer and RGB-D video data, detailed annotations, and an evaluation protocol for comparison of activity recognition algorithms. Providing baseline results for one possible activity recognition task, this paper further investigates modality fusion methods at different stages of the recognition pipeline: (i) prior to feature extraction through accelerometer localization, (ii) at feature level via feature concatenation, and (iii) at classification level by combining classifier outputs. Empirical evaluation shows that fusing information captured by these sensor types can considerably improve recognition performance.
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paper_title: Audio-visual classification and detection of human manipulation actions

paper_content:

This thesis builds on the observation that robots cannot be programmed to handle any possible situation in the world. Like humans, they need mechanisms to deal with previously unseen situations and unknown objects. One of the skills humans rely on to deal with the unknown is the ability to learn by observing others. This thesis addresses the challenge of enabling a robot to learn from a human instructor. In particular, it is focused on objects. How can a robot find previously unseen objects? How can it track the object with its gaze? How can the object be employed in activities? Throughout this thesis, these questions are addressed with the end goal of allowing a robot to observe a human instructor and learn how to perform an activity. The robot is assumed to know very little about the world and it is supposed to discover objects autonomously. Given a visual input, object hypotheses are formulated by leveraging on common contextual knowledge often used by humans (e.g. gravity, compactness, convexity). Moreover, unknown objects are tracked and their appearance is updated over time since only a small fraction of the object is visible from the robot initially. Finally, object functionality is inferred by looking how the human instructor is manipulating objects and how objects are used in relation to others. All the methods included in this thesis have been evaluated on datasets that are publicly available or that we collected, showing the importance of these learning abilities.
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paper_title: Slice&Dice: Recognizing Food Preparation Activities Using Embedded Accelerometers

paper_content:

Within the context of an endeavor to provide situated support for people with cognitive impairments in the kitchen, we developed and evaluated classifiers for recognizing 11 actions involved in food preparation. Data was collected from 20 lay subjects using four specially designed kitchen utensils incorporating embedded 3-axis accelerometers. Subjects were asked to prepare a mixed salad in our laboratory-based instrumented kitchen environment. Video of each subject's food preparation activities were independently annotated by three different coders. Several classifiers were trained and tested using these features. With an overall accuracy of 82.9% our investigation demonstrated that a broad set of food preparation actions can be reliably recognized using sensors embedded in kitchen utensils.
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paper_title: A public domain dataset for ADL recognition using wrist-placed accelerometers

paper_content:

The automatic monitoring of specific Activities of Daily Living (ADL) can be a useful tool for Human-Robot Interaction in smart environments and Assistive Robotics applications. The qualitative definition that is given for most ADL and the lack of well-defined benchmarks, however, are obstacles toward the identification of the most effective monitoring approaches for different tasks. The contribution of the article is two-fold: (i) we propose a taxonomy of ADL allowing for their categorization with respect to the most suitable monitoring approach; (ii) we present a freely available dataset of acceleration data, coming from a wrist-worn wearable device, targeting the recognition of 14 different human activities.
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paper_title: Recognizing Fine-Grained and Composite Activities Using Hand-Centric Features and Script Data

paper_content:

Activity recognition has shown impressive progress in recent years. However, the challenges of detecting fine-grained activities and understanding how they are combined into composite activities have been largely overlooked. In this work we approach both tasks and present a dataset which provides detailed annotations to address them. The first challenge is to detect fine-grained activities, which are defined by low inter-class variability and are typically characterized by fine-grained body motions. We explore how human pose and hands can help to approach this challenge by comparing two pose-based and two hand-centric features with state-of-the-art holistic features. To attack the second challenge, recognizing composite activities, we leverage the fact that these activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. We show the benefits of our hand-centric approach for fine-grained activity classification and detection. For composite activity recognition we find that decomposition into attributes allows sharing information across composites and is essential to attack this hard task. Using script data we can recognize novel composites without having training data for them.
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paper_title: Script data for attribute-based recognition of composite activities

paper_content:

State-of-the-art human activity recognition methods build on discriminative learning which requires a representative training set for good performance. This leads to scalability issues for the recognition of large sets of highly diverse activities. In this paper we leverage the fact that many human activities are compositional and that the essential components of the activities can be obtained from textual descriptions or scripts. To share and transfer knowledge between composite activities we model them by a common set of attributes corresponding to basic actions and object participants. This attribute representation allows to incorporate script data that delivers new variations of a composite activity or even to unseen composite activities. In our experiments on 41 composite cooking tasks, we found that script data to successfully capture the high variability of composite activities. We show improvements in a supervised case where training data for all composite cooking tasks is available, but we are also able to recognize unseen composites by just using script data and without any manual video annotation.
---
paper_title: A database for fine grained activity detection of cooking activities

paper_content:

While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.
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Title: Datasets on Object Manipulation and Interaction: A Survey

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Write about the significance and the role of datasets in scientific fields, especially in object manipulation research, and introduce the purpose of the survey.

Section 2: DATASETS OF COOKING ACTIVITY
Description 2: Present datasets related to cooking activities, providing details on the modalities, activities performed, and annotations, along with their relevance to object manipulation.

Section 3: DATASETS OF ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING (ADL)
Description 3: Discuss datasets encompassing general daily activities, specifying the included modalities, types of activities, annotations, and their application to object manipulation research.

Section 4: DATASET SUMMARY
Description 4: Summarize the findings from the reviewed datasets, highlighting shared annotated activities, object identifiability, and forms of temporal segmentation, and provide a complete list of annotated activities.

Section 5: CONCLUSION
Description 5: Provide a summary of the review, reiterate the significance of the surveyed datasets for object manipulation research, and offer suggestions for future datasets.

Section 6: ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Description 6: Acknowledge the financial and academic support received for conducting the survey and compiling the review.