Action Anticipation for Collaborative Environments: The Impact of Contextual Information and Uncertainty-Based Prediction

For effectively interacting with humans in collaborative environments, machines need to be able anticipate future events, in order to execute actions in a timely manner. However, the observation of the human limbs movements may not be sufficient to anticipate their actions in an unambiguous manner. In this work we consider two additional sources of information (i.e. context) over time, gaze movements and object information, and study how these additional contextual cues improve the action anticipation performance. We address action anticipation as a classification task, where the model takes the available information as the input, and predicts the most likely action. We propose to use the uncertainty about each prediction as an online decision-making criterion for action anticipation. Uncertainty is modeled as a stochastic process applied to a time-based neural network architecture, which improves the conventional class-likelihood (i.e. deterministic) criterion. The main contributions of this paper are three-fold: (i) we propose a deep architecture that outperforms previous results in the action anticipation task; (ii) we show that contextual information is important do disambiguate the interpretation of similar actions; (iii) we propose the minimization of uncertainty as a more effective criterion for action anticipation, when compared with the maximization of class probability. Our results on the Acticipate dataset showed the importance of contextual information and the uncertainty criterion for action anticipation. We achieve an average accuracy of 98.75% in the anticipation task using only an average of 25% of observations. In addition, considering that a good anticipation model should also perform well in the action recognition task, we achieve an average accuracy of 100% in action recognition on the Acticipate dataset, when the entire observation set is used.