Review: Techniques in Egocentric Multi-View Image Analysis: Advances, Challenges, and Future Directions

Egocentric multi-view image analysis refers to the processing of utilizing synchronized video streams captured from multiple wearable cameras worn on the head or body, providing complementary first-person perspectives of dynamic, real-world interactions. Unlike single-view egocentric vision, which may suffer from severe occlusions, motion blur, and limited field-of-view or traditional fixed-camera multi-view setups (assuming static geometry and controlled environments), egocentric multi-view systems leverage body-worn rigs to enable a more robust and flexible 3D understanding in open-world, mobile scenarios. In this work, we present a systematic survey of advancements in cross-view feature fusion, geometric consistency enforcement, open-world detection, human-object interaction (HOI) modeling, action segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and novel-view synthesis specifically tailored to wearable multi-camera platforms. Key datasets released between 2024 and 2026-including HOT3D (833 min of synchronized multi-view hand/object interactions from Project Aria and Quest 3), MultiEgo (first multi-egocentric dataset for 4D social scene reconstruction), and Ego-1K (large-scale 12-camera rig for dynamic 3D video synthesis) are thoroughly examined alongside an analysis of integrations with large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models that drive performance gains, typically in the 15-30% range over single-view baselines in hand tracking, HOI recognition, and reconstruction fidelity, although we show through a consolidated meta-analysis that this gain is task-dependent: larger for geometry-bottlenecked tasks such as in-hand object lifting, and smaller, method-dependent, or occasionally negative for semantic-recognition tasks such as keystep recognition under naive view fusion. These methods cover work in multi-view stereo, cross-view learning, and novel-view synthesis while addressing several real-time wearable constraints. Practical applications such as immersive Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), assistive robotics, and healthcare monitoring are also discussed together with the challenges in motion calibration, benchmark diversity, and edge deployment ability. Thus, in this review, we attempt to fill a critical gap by focusing exclusively on wearable multi-view systems in an open-world setting, synthesizing the latest literature to chart future directions toward more embodied and continual learning agents.