50,177 research outputs found
SALSA: A Novel Dataset for Multimodal Group Behavior Analysis
Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social
settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information
available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing
native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social
scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in
extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity
and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To
this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and
Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research
on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions
among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes,
under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting
difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations,
numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To
alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the
social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges
worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth
and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations
concerning individuals' personality as well as their position, head, body
orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through
extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the
limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues
synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is
available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
F-formation Detection: Individuating Free-standing Conversational Groups in Images
Detection of groups of interacting people is a very interesting and useful
task in many modern technologies, with application fields spanning from
video-surveillance to social robotics. In this paper we first furnish a
rigorous definition of group considering the background of the social sciences:
this allows us to specify many kinds of group, so far neglected in the Computer
Vision literature. On top of this taxonomy, we present a detailed state of the
art on the group detection algorithms. Then, as a main contribution, we present
a brand new method for the automatic detection of groups in still images, which
is based on a graph-cuts framework for clustering individuals; in particular we
are able to codify in a computational sense the sociological definition of
F-formation, that is very useful to encode a group having only proxemic
information: position and orientation of people. We call the proposed method
Graph-Cuts for F-formation (GCFF). We show how GCFF definitely outperforms all
the state of the art methods in terms of different accuracy measures (some of
them are brand new), demonstrating also a strong robustness to noise and
versatility in recognizing groups of various cardinality.Comment: 32 pages, submitted to PLOS On
First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Spotting Agreement and Disagreement: A Survey of Nonverbal Audiovisual Cues and Tools
While detecting and interpreting temporal patterns of nonâverbal behavioral cues in a given context is a natural and often unconscious process for humans, it remains a rather difficult task for computer systems. Nevertheless, it is an important one to achieve if the goal is to realise a naturalistic communication between humans and machines. Machines that are able to sense social attitudes like agreement and disagreement and respond to them in a meaningful way are likely to be welcomed by users due to the more natural, efficient and humanâcentered interaction they are bound to experience. This paper surveys the nonverbal cues that could be present during agreement and disagreement behavioural displays and lists a number of tools that could be useful in detecting them, as well as a few publicly available databases that could be used to train these tools for analysis of spontaneous, audiovisual instances of agreement and disagreement
Towards Simulating Humans in Augmented Multi-party Interaction
Human-computer interaction requires modeling of the user. A user profile typically contains preferences, interests, characteristics, and interaction behavior. However, in its multimodal interaction with a smart environment the user displays characteristics that show how the user, not necessarily consciously, verbally and nonverbally provides the smart environment with useful input and feedback. Especially in ambient intelligence environments we encounter situations where the environment supports interaction between the environment, smart objects (e.g., mobile robots, smart furniture) and human participants in the environment. Therefore it is useful for the profile to contain a physical representation of the user obtained by multi-modal capturing techniques. We discuss the modeling and simulation of interacting participants in the European AMI research project
Tracking Gaze and Visual Focus of Attention of People Involved in Social Interaction
The visual focus of attention (VFOA) has been recognized as a prominent
conversational cue. We are interested in estimating and tracking the VFOAs
associated with multi-party social interactions. We note that in this type of
situations the participants either look at each other or at an object of
interest; therefore their eyes are not always visible. Consequently both gaze
and VFOA estimation cannot be based on eye detection and tracking. We propose a
method that exploits the correlation between eye gaze and head movements. Both
VFOA and gaze are modeled as latent variables in a Bayesian switching
state-space model. The proposed formulation leads to a tractable learning
procedure and to an efficient algorithm that simultaneously tracks gaze and
visual focus. The method is tested and benchmarked using two publicly available
datasets that contain typical multi-party human-robot and human-human
interactions.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 6 table
Machine Understanding of Human Behavior
A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior
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
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