The Evolution of First Person Vision Methods: A Survey

Abstract — The emergence of new wearable technologies, such as action cameras and smart glasses, has increased the interest of computer vision scientists in the first person perspective. Nowadays, this field is attracting attention and investments of companies aiming to develop commercial devices with first person vision (FPV) recording capabilities. Due to this interest, an increasing demand of methods to process these videos, possibly in real time, is expected. The current approaches present a par-ticular combinations of different image features and quantitative methods to accomplish specific objectives like object detection, activity recognition, user–machine interaction, and so on. This paper summarizes the evolution of the state of the art in FPV video analysis between 1997 and 2014, highlighting, among others, the most commonly used features, methods, challenges, and opportunities within the field. Index Terms — Computer vision, egocentric vision, first person vision (FPV), human–machine interaction, smart glasses, video analytics, wearable devices. I