Hand Detection in First Person Vision

The emergence of new pervasive wearable technologies (e.g. action cameras and smart glasses) calls attention to the so called First Person Vision (FPV). In the future, more and more everyday-life videos will be shot from a first-person point of view, overturning the classical fixed-camera understanding of Vision, specializing the existing knowledge of moving cameras and bringing new challenges in the field of video processing. The trend in research is going to be oriented towards a new type of computer vision, centred on moving sensors and driven by the need for new applications for wearable devices. We identify hand tracking and gesture recognition as an essential topic in this field, motivated by the simple realization that we often look at our hand, even while performing the simplest tasks in everyday life. In addition, the next frontier in user interfaces are hands-free devices. In this work we argue that applications based on FPV may involve information fusion at various complexity and abstraction levels, ranging from pure image processing to inference over patterns. We address the lowest, by proposing a first investigation on hand detection from a first-person point of view sensor and some preliminary results obtained fusing colour and optic flow information.