  In this paper, we propose a methodology for early recognition of human
activities from videos taken with a first-person viewpoint. Early recognition,
which is also known as activity prediction, is an ability to infer an ongoing
activity at its early stage. We present an algorithm to perform recognition of
activities targeted at the camera from streaming videos, making the system to
predict intended activities of the interacting person and avoid harmful events
before they actually happen. We introduce the novel concept of 'onset' that
efficiently summarizes pre-activity observations, and design an approach to
consider event history in addition to ongoing video observation for early
first-person recognition of activities. We propose to represent onset using
cascade histograms of time series gradients, and we describe a novel
algorithmic setup to take advantage of onset for early recognition of
activities. The experimental results clearly illustrate that the proposed
concept of onset enables better/earlier recognition of human activities from
first-person videos.
