Lightweight Vision Transformer Framework for Real-Time Human–Object Interaction Recognition

Human–Object Interaction (HOI) recognition is a fundamental task in intelligent computing systems, enabling machines to understand how humans engage with surrounding objects in real-time environments. Traditional deep learning approaches for HOI rely heavily on convolutional architectures, which often struggle with long-range dependencies and are computationally expensive for edge deployment. This paper proposes a Lightweight Vision Transformer Framework (LVTF) designed specifically for efficient and accurate real-time HOI recognition. The framework employs a patch-based visual encoder combined with optimized multi-head attention mechanisms to capture global contextual relationships between humans and objects. A lightweight decoder further refines these representations to generate interaction labels with minimal latency. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark HOI datasets demonstrate that the LVTF achieves competitive accuracy while reducing computational complexity by nearly 40% compared to conventional transformer and CNN-based models. The reduced model footprint and low inference delay make the proposed approach highly suitable for real-time intelligent applications, including smart surveillance, assistive robotics, and human–computer interaction systems.