Semantic parsing of human manipulation activities using on-line learned models for robot imitation

Human manipulation activity recognition is an important yet challenging task in robot imitation. In this paper, we introduce, for the first time, a novel method for semantic decomposition and recognition of continuous human manipulation activities by using on-line learned individual manipulation models. Solely based on the spatiotemporal interactions between objects and hands in the scene, the proposed framework can parse not only sequential and concurrent (overlapping) manipulation streams but also basic primitive elements of each detected manipulation. Without requiring any prior object knowledge, the framework can furthermore extract object-like scene entities that are performing the same role in the detected manipulations. The framework was evaluated on our new egocentric activity dataset which contains 120 different samples of 8 single atomic manipulations (e.g. Cutting and Stirring) and 20 long and complex activity demonstrations such as “making a sandwich” and “preparing a breakfast”. We finally show that parsed manipulation actions can be imitated by robots even in various scene contexts with novel objects.