EventTransAct: A Video Transformer-Based Framework for Event-Camera Based Action Recognition

Abstract

Recognizing and comprehending human actions and gestures is a crucial perception requirement for robots to interact with humans and carry out tasks in diverse domains, including service robotics, healthcare, and manufacturing. Event cameras, with their ability to capture fast-moving objects at a high temporal resolution, offer new opportunities compared to standard action recognition in RGB videos. However, previous research on event camera action recognition has primarily focused on sensor-specific network architectures and image encoding, which may not be suitable for new sensors and limit the use of recent advancement in transformer-based architectures. In this study, we employ using a computationally efficient model, namely the video transformer network (VTN), which initially acquires spatial embeddings per event-frame and then utilizes a temporal self-attention mechanism. This approach separates the spatial and temporal operations, resulting in VTN being more computationally efficient than other video transformers that process spatio-temporal volumes directly. In order to better adopt the VTN for the sparse and finegrained nature of event data, we design Event-Contrastive Loss <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\left(\mathscr{L}_{E C}\right)$</tex> and event specific augmentations. Proposed <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\left(\mathscr{L}_{E C}\right)$</tex> promotes learning fine-grained spatial cues in the spatial backbone of VTN by contrasting temporally misaligned frames. We evaluate our method on real-world action recognition of N-EPIC Kitchens dataset, and achieve state-of-the-art results on both protocols - testing in seen kitchen (74.9% accuracy) and testing in unseen kitchens (42.43% and 46.66% Accuracy). Our approach also takes less computation time compared to competitive prior approaches. We also evaluate our method on the standard DVS Gesture recognition dataset, achieving a competitive accuracy of 97.9% compared to prior work that uses dedicated architectures and image-encoding for the DVS dataset. These results demonstrate the potential of our framework EventTransAct for real-world applications of event-camera based action recognition. Project Page: https://tristandb8.github.io/EventTransAct_webpage/