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Bristol behind world’s first massive egocentric dataset

Press release issued: 15 October 2021

The University of Bristol is part of an international consortium of 13 universities, in partnership with Facebook AI, that have collaborated to advance egocentric perception.

As a result of this initiative, they have built the world’s largest egocentric dataset using off-the-shelf, head-mounted cameras.

Progress in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) requires learning from the same data humans process to perceive the world. Our eyes allow us to explore places, understand people, manipulate objects and enjoy activities - from the mundane act of opening a door to the exciting interaction of a game of football with friends.

Egocentric 4D Live Perception (Ego4D) is a massive-scale dataset that compiles 3,025 hours of footage from the wearable cameras of 855 participants in nine countries: UK, India, Japan, Singapore, KSA, Colombia, Rwanda, Italy and the US. The data captures a wide range of activities from the ‘egocentric’ perspective – that is from the viewpoint of the person carrying out the activity. The University of Bristol is the only UK representative in this diverse and international effort, collecting 270 hours from 82  participants who captured footage of their chosen activities of daily living – such as practicing a musical  instrument, gardening, grooming their pet or assembling furniture.

Read the full University of Bristol press release

Further information

EGO4D Team at the University of Bristol:

Prof Dima Damen – Professor of Computer Vision

Dr Michael Wray – postdoctoral researcher

Mr Will Price – PhD student

Mr Jonathan Munro – PhD student

Mr Adriano Fragomeni – PhD student

Consortium members:

  • University of Bristol, UK
  • Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburg, USA and Rwanda)
  • Georgia Tech, USA
  • Indiana University, USA
  • International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
  • King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), KSA
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
  • National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
  • University of Catania, Italy
  • University of Minnesota, USA
  • University of Pennsylvania, USA
  • University of Tokyo, Japan

EPIC-KITCHENS is a collaboration with the University of Toronto (Canada) and the University of Catania (Italy), led by the University of Bristol to collect and annotate the largest (over 20 million frames) dataset, capturing 45 individuals in their own homes, over several consecutive days.  

The dataset was collected in 4 different countries and was narrated in 6 languages to assist in vision and language challenges. It offers a series of challenges from object recognition to action prediction and activity modelling in non-scripted realistic daily setting. 

The size of publicly available datasets is crucial to the progress of this field, which is of prime importance to robotics, healthcare and augmented reality. 

Read more about EPIC-KITCHENS in our blog: EPIC-KITCHENS: Bringing helpful AI closer to reality

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