Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects

We interact with the world with our hands and see it through our own (egocentric) perspective. A holistic 3D understanding of such interactions from egocentric views is important for tasks in robotics, AR/VR, action recognition and motion generation. Accurately reconstructing such interactions in 3D is challenging due to heavy occlusion, viewpoint bias, camera distortion, and motion blur from the head movement. To this end, we designed the HANDS23 challenge based on the AssemblyHands and ARCTIC datasets with carefully designed training and testing splits. Based on the results of the top submitted methods and more recent baselines on the leaderboards, we perform a thorough analysis on 3D hand(-object) reconstruction tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing distortion specific to egocentric cameras, adopting high-capacity transformers to learn complex hand-object interactions, and fusing predictions from different views. Our study further reveals challenging scenarios intractable with state-of-the-art methods, such as fast hand motion, object reconstruction from narrow egocentric views, and close contact between two hands and objects. Our efforts will enrich the community's knowledge foundation and facilitate future hand studies on egocentric hand-object interactions.

Class-Wise Buffer Management for Incremental Object Detection: An Effective Buffer Training Strategy

Class incremental learning aims to solve a problem that arises when continuously adding unseen class instances to an existing model This approach has been extensively studied in the context of image classification; however its applicability to object detection is not well established yet. Existing frameworks using replay methods mainly collect replay data without considering the model being trained and tend to rely on randomness or the number of labels of each sample. Also, despite the effectiveness of the replay, it was not yet optimized for the object detection task. In this paper, we introduce an effective buffer training strategy (eBTS) that creates the optimized replay buffer on object detection. Our approach incorporates guarantee minimum and hierarchical sampling to establish the buffer customized to the trained model. %These methods can facilitate effective retrieval of prior knowledge. Furthermore, we use the circular experience replay training to optimally utilize the accumulated buffer data. Experiments on the MS COCO dataset demonstrate that our eBTS achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to the existing replay schemes.