Modern perception models, particularly those designed for multisensory egocentric tasks, have achieved remarkable performance but often come with substantial computational costs. These high demands pose challenges for real-world deployment, especially in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we introduce EgoAdapt, a framework that adaptively performs cross-modal distillation and policy learning to enable efficient inference across different egocentric perception tasks, including egocentric action recognition, active speaker localization, and behavior anticipation. Our proposed policy module is adaptable to task-specific action spaces, making it broadly applicable. Experimental results on three challenging egocentric datasets EPIC-Kitchens, EasyCom, and Aria Everyday Activities demonstrate that our method significantly enhances efficiency, reducing GMACs by up to 89.09%, parameters up to 82.02%, and energy up to 9.6x, while still on-par and in many cases outperforming, the performance of corresponding state-of-the-art models.
Egocentric videos provide comprehensive contexts for user and scene understanding, spanning multisensory perception to behavioral interaction. We propose Spherical World-Locking (SWL) as a general framework for egocentric scene representation, which implicitly transforms multisensory streams with respect to measurements of head orientation. Compared to conventional head-locked egocentric representations with a 2D planar field-of-view, SWL effectively offsets challenges posed by self-motion, allowing for improved spatial synchronization between input modalities. Using a set of multisensory embeddings on a worldlocked sphere, we design a unified encoder-decoder transformer architecture that preserves the spherical structure of the scene representation, without requiring expensive projections between image and world coordinate systems. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on multiple benchmark tasks for egocentric video understanding, including audio-visual active speaker localization, auditory spherical source localization, and behavior anticipation in everyday activities.
An essential goal of computational media intelligence is to support understanding how media stories -- be it news, commercial or entertainment media -- represent and reflect society and these portrayals are perceived. People are a central element of media stories. This paper focuses on understanding the representation and depiction of background characters in media depictions, primarily movies and TV shows. We define the background characters as those who do not participate vocally in any scene throughout the movie and address the problem of localizing background characters in videos. We use an active speaker localization system to extract high-confidence face-speech associations and generate audio-visual profiles for talking characters in a movie by automatically clustering them. Using a face verification system, we then prune all the face-tracks which match any of the generated character profiles and obtain the background character face-tracks. We curate a background character dataset which provides annotations for background character for a set of TV shows, and use it to evaluate the performance of the background character detection framework.
Augmented reality devices have the potential to enhance human perception and enable other assistive functionalities in complex conversational environments. Effectively capturing the audio-visual context necessary for understanding these social interactions first requires detecting and localizing the voice activities of the device wearer and the surrounding people. These tasks are challenging due to their egocentric nature: the wearer's head motion may cause motion blur, surrounding people may appear in difficult viewing angles, and there may be occlusions, visual clutter, audio noise, and bad lighting. Under these conditions, previous state-of-the-art active speaker detection methods do not give satisfactory results. Instead, we tackle the problem from a new setting using both video and multi-channel microphone array audio. We propose a novel end-to-end deep learning approach that is able to give robust voice activity detection and localization results. In contrast to previous methods, our method localizes active speakers from all possible directions on the sphere, even outside the camera's field of view, while simultaneously detecting the device wearer's own voice activity. Our experiments show that the proposed method gives superior results, can run in real time, and is robust against noise and clutter.
An objective understanding of media depictions, such as inclusive portrayals of how much someone is heard and seen on screen such as in film and television, requires the machines to discern automatically who, when, how, and where someone is talking, and not. Speaker activity can be automatically discerned from the rich multimodal information present in the media content. This is however a challenging problem due to the vast variety and contextual variability in the media content, and the lack of labeled data. In this work, we present a cross-modal neural network for learning visual representations, which have implicit information pertaining to the spatial location of a speaker in the visual frames. Avoiding the need for manual annotations for active speakers in visual frames, acquiring of which is very expensive, we present a weakly supervised system for the task of localizing active speakers in movie content. We use the learned cross-modal visual representations, and provide weak supervision from movie subtitles acting as a proxy for voice activity, thus requiring no manual annotations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed system on the AVA active speaker dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of the cross-modal embeddings for localizing active speakers in comparison to fully supervised systems. We also demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for the task of voice activity detection in an audio-visual framework, especially when speech is accompanied by noise and music.