4,199 research outputs found
Predicting Head Pose in Dyadic Conversation
Natural movement plays a significant role in realistic speech animation. Numerous studies have demonstrated the contribution visual cues make to the degree we, as human observers, find an animation acceptable. Rigid head motion is one visual mode that universally co-occurs with speech, and so it is a reasonable strategy to seek features from the speech mode to predict the head pose. Several previous authors have shown that prediction is possible, but experiments are typically confined to rigidly produced dialogue. Expressive, emotive and prosodic speech exhibit motion patterns that are far more difficult to predict with considerable variation in expected head pose. People involved in dyadic conversation adapt speech and head motion in response to the others’ speech and head motion. Using Deep Bi-Directional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM) neural networks, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict not just the head motion of the speaker, but also the head motion of the listener from the speech signal
Robust Modeling of Epistemic Mental States
This work identifies and advances some research challenges in the analysis of
facial features and their temporal dynamics with epistemic mental states in
dyadic conversations. Epistemic states are: Agreement, Concentration,
Thoughtful, Certain, and Interest. In this paper, we perform a number of
statistical analyses and simulations to identify the relationship between
facial features and epistemic states. Non-linear relations are found to be more
prevalent, while temporal features derived from original facial features have
demonstrated a strong correlation with intensity changes. Then, we propose a
novel prediction framework that takes facial features and their nonlinear
relation scores as input and predict different epistemic states in videos. The
prediction of epistemic states is boosted when the classification of emotion
changing regions such as rising, falling, or steady-state are incorporated with
the temporal features. The proposed predictive models can predict the epistemic
states with significantly improved accuracy: correlation coefficient (CoERR)
for Agreement is 0.827, for Concentration 0.901, for Thoughtful 0.794, for
Certain 0.854, and for Interest 0.913.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Multimedia Tools and Application, Special
Issue: Socio-Affective Technologie
Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour
Rapport, the close and harmonious relationship in which interaction partners
are "in sync" with each other, was shown to result in smoother social
interactions, improved collaboration, and improved interpersonal outcomes. In
this work, we are first to investigate automatic prediction of low rapport
during natural interactions within small groups. This task is challenging given
that rapport only manifests in subtle non-verbal signals that are, in addition,
subject to influences of group dynamics as well as inter-personal
idiosyncrasies. We record videos of unscripted discussions of three to four
people using a multi-view camera system and microphones. We analyse a rich set
of non-verbal signals for rapport detection, namely facial expressions, hand
motion, gaze, speaker turns, and speech prosody. Using facial features, we can
detect low rapport with an average precision of 0.7 (chance level at 0.25),
while incorporating prior knowledge of participants' personalities can even
achieve early prediction without a drop in performance. We further provide a
detailed analysis of different feature sets and the amount of information
contained in different temporal segments of the interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure
LOMo: Latent Ordinal Model for Facial Analysis in Videos
We study the problem of facial analysis in videos. We propose a novel weakly
supervised learning method that models the video event (expression, pain etc.)
as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and
offset phase for smile, brow lower and cheek raise for pain). The proposed
model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent
SVM/HCRF- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal or temporal aspect in
the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant
competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based
facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent
in dyadic conversations. In combination with complimentary features, we report
state-of-the-art results on these datasets.Comment: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
(CVPR
Robust Modeling of Epistemic Mental States and Their Applications in Assistive Technology
This dissertation presents the design and implementation of EmoAssist: Emotion-Enabled Assistive Tool to Enhance Dyadic Conversation for the Blind . The key functionalities of the system are to recognize behavioral expressions and to predict 3-D affective dimensions from visual cues and to provide audio feedback to the visually impaired in a natural environment. Prior to describing the EmoAssist, this dissertation identifies and advances research challenges in the analysis of the facial features and their temporal dynamics with Epistemic Mental States in dyadic conversation. A number of statistical analyses and simulations were performed to get the answer of important research questions about the complex interplay between facial features and mental states. It was found that the non-linear relations are mostly prevalent rather than the linear ones. Further, the portable prototype of assistive technology that can aid blind individual to understand his/her interlocutor\u27s mental states has been designed based on the analysis. A number of challenges related to the system, communication protocols, error-free tracking of face and robust modeling of behavioral expressions /affective dimensions were addressed to make the EmoAssist effective in a real world scenario. In addition, orientation-sensor information from the phone was used to correct image alignment to improve the robustness in real life deployment. It was observed that the EmoAssist can predict affective dimensions with acceptable accuracy (Maximum Correlation-Coefficient for valence: 0.76, arousal: 0.78, and dominance: 0.76) in natural conversation. The overall minimum and maximum response-times are (64.61 milliseconds) and (128.22 milliseconds), respectively. The integration of sensor information for correcting the orientation has helped in significant improvement (16% in average) of accuracy in recognizing behavioral expressions. A user study with ten blind people shows that the EmoAssist is highly acceptable to them (Average acceptability rating using Likert: 6.0 where 1 and 7 are the lowest and highest possible ratings, respectively) in social interaction
Sensing, interpreting, and anticipating human social behaviour in the real world
Low-level nonverbal social signals like glances, utterances, facial expressions and body language are central to human communicative situations and have been shown to be connected to important high-level constructs, such as emotions, turn-taking, rapport, or leadership. A prerequisite for the creation of social machines that are able to support humans in e.g. education, psychotherapy, or human resources is the ability to automatically sense, interpret, and anticipate human nonverbal behaviour. While promising results have been shown in controlled settings, automatically analysing unconstrained situations, e.g. in daily-life settings, remains challenging. Furthermore, anticipation of nonverbal behaviour in social situations is still largely unexplored. The goal of this thesis is to move closer to the vision of social machines in the real world. It makes fundamental contributions along the three dimensions of sensing, interpreting and anticipating nonverbal behaviour in social interactions. First, robust recognition of low-level nonverbal behaviour lays the groundwork for all further analysis steps. Advancing human visual behaviour sensing is especially relevant as the current state of the art is still not satisfactory in many daily-life situations. While many social interactions take place in groups, current methods for unsupervised eye contact detection can only handle dyadic interactions. We propose a novel unsupervised method for multi-person eye contact detection by exploiting the connection between gaze and speaking turns. Furthermore, we make use of mobile device engagement to address the problem of calibration drift that occurs in daily-life usage of mobile eye trackers. Second, we improve the interpretation of social signals in terms of higher level social behaviours. In particular, we propose the first dataset and method for emotion recognition from bodily expressions of freely moving, unaugmented dyads. Furthermore, we are the first to study low rapport detection in group interactions, as well as investigating a cross-dataset evaluation setting for the emergent leadership detection task. Third, human visual behaviour is special because it functions as a social signal and also determines what a person is seeing at a given moment in time. Being able to anticipate human gaze opens up the possibility for machines to more seamlessly share attention with humans, or to intervene in a timely manner if humans are about to overlook important aspects of the environment. We are the first to propose methods for the anticipation of eye contact in dyadic conversations, as well as in the context of mobile device interactions during daily life, thereby paving the way for interfaces that are able to proactively intervene and support interacting humans.Blick, Gesichtsausdrücke, Körpersprache, oder Prosodie spielen als nonverbale Signale eine zentrale Rolle in menschlicher Kommunikation. Sie wurden durch vielzählige Studien mit wichtigen Konzepten wie Emotionen, Sprecherwechsel, Führung, oder der Qualität des Verhältnisses zwischen zwei Personen in Verbindung gebracht. Damit Menschen effektiv während ihres täglichen sozialen Lebens von Maschinen unterstützt werden können, sind automatische Methoden zur Erkennung, Interpretation, und Antizipation von nonverbalem Verhalten notwendig. Obwohl die bisherige Forschung in kontrollierten Studien zu ermutigenden Ergebnissen gekommen ist, bleibt die automatische Analyse nonverbalen Verhaltens in weniger kontrollierten Situationen eine Herausforderung. Darüber hinaus existieren kaum Untersuchungen zur Antizipation von nonverbalem Verhalten in sozialen Situationen. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, die Vision vom automatischen Verstehen sozialer Situationen ein Stück weit mehr Realität werden zu lassen. Diese Arbeit liefert wichtige Beiträge zur autmatischen Erkennung menschlichen Blickverhaltens in alltäglichen Situationen. Obwohl viele soziale Interaktionen in Gruppen stattfinden, existieren unüberwachte Methoden zur Augenkontakterkennung bisher lediglich für dyadische Interaktionen. Wir stellen einen neuen Ansatz zur Augenkontakterkennung in Gruppen vor, welcher ohne manuelle Annotationen auskommt, indem er sich den statistischen Zusammenhang zwischen Blick- und Sprechverhalten zu Nutze macht. Tägliche Aktivitäten sind eine Herausforderung für Geräte zur mobile Augenbewegungsmessung, da Verschiebungen dieser Geräte zur Verschlechterung ihrer Kalibrierung führen können. In dieser Arbeit verwenden wir Nutzerverhalten an mobilen Endgeräten, um den Effekt solcher Verschiebungen zu korrigieren. Neben der Erkennung verbessert diese Arbeit auch die Interpretation sozialer Signale. Wir veröffentlichen den ersten Datensatz sowie die erste Methode zur Emotionserkennung in dyadischen Interaktionen ohne den Einsatz spezialisierter Ausrüstung. Außerdem stellen wir die erste Studie zur automatischen Erkennung mangelnder Verbundenheit in Gruppeninteraktionen vor, und führen die erste datensatzübergreifende Evaluierung zur Detektion von sich entwickelndem Führungsverhalten durch. Zum Abschluss der Arbeit präsentieren wir die ersten Ansätze zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten in sozialen Interaktionen. Blickverhalten hat die besondere Eigenschaft, dass es sowohl als soziales Signal als auch der Ausrichtung der visuellen Wahrnehmung dient. Somit eröffnet die Fähigkeit zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten Maschinen die Möglichkeit, sich sowohl nahtloser in soziale Interaktionen einzufügen, als auch Menschen zu warnen, wenn diese Gefahr laufen wichtige Aspekte der Umgebung zu übersehen. Wir präsentieren Methoden zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten im Kontext der Interaktion mit mobilen Endgeräten während täglicher Aktivitäten, als auch während dyadischer Interaktionen mittels Videotelefonie
AgentAvatar: Disentangling Planning, Driving and Rendering for Photorealistic Avatar Agents
In this study, our goal is to create interactive avatar agents that can
autonomously plan and animate nuanced facial movements realistically, from both
visual and behavioral perspectives. Given high-level inputs about the
environment and agent profile, our framework harnesses LLMs to produce a series
of detailed text descriptions of the avatar agents' facial motions. These
descriptions are then processed by our task-agnostic driving engine into motion
token sequences, which are subsequently converted into continuous motion
embeddings that are further consumed by our standalone neural-based renderer to
generate the final photorealistic avatar animations. These streamlined
processes allow our framework to adapt to a variety of non-verbal avatar
interactions, both monadic and dyadic. Our extensive study, which includes
experiments on both newly compiled and existing datasets featuring two types of
agents -- one capable of monadic interaction with the environment, and the
other designed for dyadic conversation -- validates the effectiveness and
versatility of our approach. To our knowledge, we advanced a leap step by
combining LLMs and neural rendering for generalized non-verbal prediction and
photo-realistic rendering of avatar agents.Comment: Project page: https://dorniwang.github.io/AgentAvatar_project
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