Special Session 7

SPECIAL SESSION #7

Francesco Ragusa

University of Catania, Italy

• francesco.ragusa@unict.it

Antonino Furnari

University of Catania, Italy

• antonino.furnari@unict.it

Giovanni Maria Farinella

University of Catania, Italy

• giovanni.farinella@unict.it

The market of smart glasses, headsets, and more in general mobile cameras is growing rapidly. These devices are able to observe the world from the egocentric point of view of the user, who interacts with the surrounding environment, touching objects, navigating spaces, and performing activities to reach his/her objectives. In this context, intelligent algorithms are needed to analyze the multimodal signals naturally acquired by wearable devices (images, videos, audio, text, gaze, IMU, etc.) and provide services to support humans where they live and work. Moreover, head-mounted displays are able to provide information to the user through mixed reality for visualization purposes. These are the two main ingredients needed to develop intelligent systems able to understand humans’ behavior and support them.

This special session aims to bring together researchers from different fields of computer vision to share their latest advances and discuss the challenges and opportunities of this emerging topic.
We welcome original contributions on topics including but not limited to:

• Augmented and Mixed Reality;
• Egocentric Perception;
• Embodied AI;
• Video Understanding for Egocentric Vision;
• Egocentric vision for summarization;
• Egocentric Social Interaction and human behavior understanding;
• Computer Vision to Improve the safety of workers;
• Privacy-preserving systems;
• Human and wearable devices interaction;
• Safety and Security;
• Egocentric vision for procedural understanding;
• Navigation Systems;
• Mobile and Wearable Systems;
• Eye tracking and gaze estimation from head mounted devices;
• Language and Vision systems.

Francesco Ragusa, is a research fellow at the University of Catania, Italy. He has completed an Industrial Doctorate in Computer Science in 2021. During his PhD studies, he has spent a period as Research Student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. His research interests concern Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Machine Learning, with focus on First Person Vision. He is part of EPICK-KITCHENS, EGO4D and EGO-EXO4D teams. He is co-founder and CEO of NEXT VISION s.r.l., an academic spin-off the the University of Catania since 2021.

Antonino Furnari, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Catania, Italy. He received his PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2016 from the University of Catania. His main research interests concern Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, with particular focus on First Person Vision. Antonino is part of the EPICKITCHENS, EGO4D and EGO-EXO4D teams. He co-organized several workshops including the ACVR, EPIC, EGO4D, and EgoVis series along ICCV, ECCV and CVPR. In the EPIC-KITCHENS team, he leads the Action Anticipation and Action Detection challenges, whereas in the EGO4D team, he contributes to the Forecasting benchmark.

Giovanni Maria Farinella, is a Full Professor, at the University of Catania, Italy. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. He is an Associate Editor of the international journals IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Giovanni is part of the EPICKITCHENS and EGO4D team. Giovanni founded and currently directs the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS), for which he was awarded PAMI Mark Everingham Prize in 2017. He frequently organises workshops alongside ECCV, ICCV and CVPR.