ActiSight: Wearer Foreground Extraction using a Practical RGB-Thermal Wearable

Abstract

Wearable cameras provide an informative view of wearer activities, context, and interactions. Video obtained from wearable cameras is useful for life-logging, human activity recognition, visual confirmation, and other tasks widely utilized in mobile computing today. Extracting foreground information related to the wearer is the fundamental operation underlying these tasks; separating irrelevant background pixels from pixels of interest. However, current wearer foreground extraction methods that depend on image data alone are slow, energy-inefficient, and even inaccurate in some cases, making many tasks—like activity recognition —challenging to implement in the absence of significant computational resources. We built ActiSight to fill this gap; a wearable RGB-Thermal video camera that uses thermal information to make wearer segmentation practical for body-worn video. Using ActiSight, we collected a total of 59 hours of video from 6 participants, capturing a wide variety of activities in a natural setting. We show that wearer foreground extracted with ActiSight achieves a high dice similarity score compared to state-of-the-art, while significantly lowering execution time and energy cost.

Publication
In International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications

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