Efficient Egocentric Action Recognition with Multimodal Data

The increasing availability of wearable XR devices opens new perspectives for Egocentric Action Recognition (EAR) systems, which can provide deeper human understanding and situation awareness. However, deploying real-time algorithms on these devices can be challenging due to the inherent trade-offs between portability, battery life, and computational resources. In this work, we systematically analyze the impact of sampling frequency across different input modalities - RGB video and 3D hand pose - on egocentric action recognition performance and CPU usage. By exploring a range of configurations, we provide a comprehensive characterization of the trade-offs between accuracy and computational efficiency. Our findings reveal that reducing the sampling rate of RGB frames, when complemented with higher-frequency 3D hand pose input, can preserve high accuracy while significantly lowering CPU demands. Notably, we observe up to a 3x reduction in CPU usage with minimal to no loss in recognition performance. This highlights the potential of multimodal input strategies as a viable approach to achieving efficient, real-time EAR on XR devices.

@article{calzavara2025_2506.01757,
  title={ Efficient Egocentric Action Recognition with Multimodal Data },
  author={ Marco Calzavara and Ard Kastrati and Matteo Macchini and Dushan Vasilevski and Roger Wattenhofer },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.01757},
  year={ 2025 }
}