7,461 research outputs found
Visual Focus of Attention Estimation from Head Pose Posterior Probability Distributions
We address the problem of recognizing the visual focus of attention (VFOA) of meeting participants from their head pose and contextual cues. The main contribution of the paper is the use of a head pose posterior distribution as a representation of the head pose information contained in the image data. This posterior encodes the probabilities of the different head poses given the image data, and constitute therefore a richer representation of the data than the mean or the mode of this distribution, as done in all previous work. These observations are exploited in a joint interaction model of all meeting participants pose observations, VFOAs, speaking status and of environmental contextual cues. Numerical experiments on a public database of 4 meetings of 22min on average show that this change of representation allows for a 5.4% gain with respect to the standard approach using head pose as observation
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
Robust Head-Pose Estimation Based on Partially-Latent Mixture of Linear Regressions
Head-pose estimation has many applications, such as social event analysis,
human-robot and human-computer interaction, driving assistance, and so forth.
Head-pose estimation is challenging because it must cope with changing
illumination conditions, variabilities in face orientation and in appearance,
partial occlusions of facial landmarks, as well as bounding-box-to-face
alignment errors. We propose tu use a mixture of linear regressions with
partially-latent output. This regression method learns to map high-dimensional
feature vectors (extracted from bounding boxes of faces) onto the joint space
of head-pose angles and bounding-box shifts, such that they are robustly
predicted in the presence of unobservable phenomena. We describe in detail the
mapping method that combines the merits of unsupervised manifold learning
techniques and of mixtures of regressions. We validate our method with three
publicly available datasets and we thoroughly benchmark four variants of the
proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art head-pose estimation methods.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 3 table
Tracking and modeling focus of attention in meetings [online]
Abstract
This thesis addresses the problem of tracking the focus of
attention of people. In particular, a system to track the focus
of attention of participants in meetings is developed. Obtaining
knowledge about a person\u27s focus of attention is an important
step towards a better understanding of what people do, how and
with what or whom they interact or to what they refer. In
meetings, focus of attention can be used to disambiguate the
addressees of speech acts, to analyze interaction and for
indexing of meeting transcripts. Tracking a user\u27s focus of
attention also greatly contributes to the improvement of
humanÂcomputer interfaces since it can be used to build interfaces
and environments that become aware of what the user is paying
attention to or with what or whom he is interacting.
The direction in which people look; i.e., their gaze, is closely
related to their focus of attention. In this thesis, we estimate
a subject\u27s focus of attention based on his or her head
orientation. While the direction in which someone looks is
determined by head orientation and eye gaze, relevant literature
suggests that head orientation alone is a su#cient cue for the
detection of someone\u27s direction of attention during social
interaction. We present experimental results from a user study
and from several recorded meetings that support this hypothesis.
We have developed a Bayesian approach to model at whom or what
someone is look ing based on his or her head orientation. To
estimate head orientations in meetings, the participants\u27 faces
are automatically tracked in the view of a panoramic camera and
neural networks are used to estimate their head orientations
from preÂprocessed images of their faces. Using this approach,
the focus of attention target of subjects could be correctly
identified during 73% of the time in a number of evaluation meetÂ
ings with four participants.
In addition, we have investigated whether a person\u27s focus of
attention can be preÂdicted from other cues. Our results show
that focus of attention is correlated to who is speaking in a
meeting and that it is possible to predict a person\u27s focus of
attention
based on the information of who is talking or was talking before
a given moment.
We have trained neural networks to predict at whom a person is
looking, based on information about who was speaking. Using this
approach we were able to predict who is looking at whom with 63%
accuracy on the evaluation meetings using only information about
who was speaking. We show that by using both head orientation
and speaker information to estimate a person\u27s focus, the
accuracy of focus detection can be improved compared to just
using one of the modalities for focus estimation.
To demonstrate the generality of our approach, we have built a
prototype system to demonstrate focusÂaware interaction with a
household robot and other smart appliances in a room using the
developed components for focus of attention tracking. In the
demonstration environment, a subject could interact with a
simulated household robot, a speechÂenabled VCR or with other
people in the room, and the recipient of the subject\u27s speech
was disambiguated based on the user\u27s direction of attention.
Zusammenfassung
Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der automatischen
Bestimmung und VerÂfolgung des Aufmerksamkeitsfokus von Personen
in Besprechungen.
Die Bestimmung des Aufmerksamkeitsfokus von Personen ist zum
Verständnis und zur automatischen Auswertung von
Besprechungsprotokollen sehr wichtig. So kann damit
beispielsweise herausgefunden werden, wer zu einem bestimmten
Zeitpunkt wen angesprochen hat beziehungsweise wer wem zugehört
hat. Die automatische BestimÂmung des Aufmerksamkeitsfokus kann
desweiteren zur Verbesserung von Mensch-MaschineÂSchnittstellen
benutzt werden.
Ein wichtiger Hinweis auf die Richtung, in welche eine Person
ihre Aufmerksamkeit richtet, ist die Kopfstellung der Person.
Daher wurde ein Verfahren zur Bestimmung der Kopfstellungen von
Personen entwickelt. Hierzu wurden kĂĽnstliche neuronale Netze
benutzt, welche als Eingaben vorverarbeitete Bilder des Kopfes
einer Person erhalten, und als Ausgabe eine Schätzung der
Kopfstellung berechnen. Mit den trainierten Netzen wurde auf
Bilddaten neuer Personen, also Personen, deren Bilder nicht in
der Trainingsmenge enthalten waren, ein mittlerer Fehler von
neun bis zehn Grad fĂĽr die Bestimmung der horizontalen und
vertikalen Kopfstellung erreicht.
Desweiteren wird ein probabilistischer Ansatz zur Bestimmung von
AufmerksamkeitsÂzielen vorgestellt. Es wird hierbei ein
Bayes\u27scher Ansatzes verwendet um die AÂposterior
iWahrscheinlichkeiten verschiedener Aufmerksamkteitsziele,
gegeben beobachteter Kopfstellungen einer Person, zu bestimmen.
Die entwickelten Ansätze wurden auf mehren Besprechungen mit
vier bis fĂĽnf Teilnehmern evaluiert.
Ein weiterer Beitrag dieser Arbeit ist die Untersuchung,
inwieweit sich die BlickrichÂtung der Besprechungsteilnehmer
basierend darauf, wer gerade spricht, vorhersagen läßt. Es wurde
ein Verfahren entwickelt um mit Hilfe von neuronalen Netzen den
Fokus einer Person basierend auf einer kurzen Historie der
Sprecherkonstellationen zu schätzen.
Wir zeigen, dass durch Kombination der bildbasierten und der
sprecherbasierten Schätzung des Aufmerksamkeitsfokus eine
deutliche verbesserte Schätzung erreicht werden kann.
Insgesamt wurde mit dieser Arbeit erstmals ein System
vorgestellt um automatisch die Aufmerksamkeit von Personen in
einem Besprechungsraum zu verfolgen.
Die entwickelten Ansätze und Methoden können auch zur Bestimmung
der AufmerkÂsamkeit von Personen in anderen Bereichen,
insbesondere zur Steuerung von computÂerisierten, interaktiven
Umgebungen, verwendet werden. Dies wird an einer
Beispielapplikation gezeigt
A Bayesian hierarchy for robust gaze estimation in human–robot interaction
In this text, we present a probabilistic solution for robust gaze estimation in the context of human–robot interaction. Gaze estimation, in the sense of continuously assessing gaze direction of an interlocutor so as to determine his/her focus of visual attention, is important in several important computer vision applications, such as the development of non-intrusive gaze-tracking equipment for psychophysical experiments in neuroscience, specialised telecommunication devices, video surveillance, human–computer interfaces (HCI) and artificial cognitive systems for human–robot interaction (HRI), our application of interest. We have developed a robust solution based on a probabilistic approach that inherently deals with the uncertainty of sensor models, but also and in particular with uncertainty arising from distance, incomplete data and scene dynamics. This solution comprises a hierarchical formulation in the form of a mixture model that loosely follows how geometrical cues provided by facial features are believed to be used by the human perceptual system for gaze estimation. A quantitative analysis of the proposed framework's performance was undertaken through a thorough set of experimental sessions. Results show that the framework performs according to the difficult requirements of HRI applications, namely by exhibiting correctness, robustness and adaptiveness
EM Algorithms for Weighted-Data Clustering with Application to Audio-Visual Scene Analysis
Data clustering has received a lot of attention and numerous methods,
algorithms and software packages are available. Among these techniques,
parametric finite-mixture models play a central role due to their interesting
mathematical properties and to the existence of maximum-likelihood estimators
based on expectation-maximization (EM). In this paper we propose a new mixture
model that associates a weight with each observed point. We introduce the
weighted-data Gaussian mixture and we derive two EM algorithms. The first one
considers a fixed weight for each observation. The second one treats each
weight as a random variable following a gamma distribution. We propose a model
selection method based on a minimum message length criterion, provide a weight
initialization strategy, and validate the proposed algorithms by comparing them
with several state of the art parametric and non-parametric clustering
techniques. We also demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the
proposed clustering technique in the presence of heterogeneous data, namely
audio-visual scene analysis.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 4 table
Mass Displacement Networks
Despite the large improvements in performance attained by using deep learning
in computer vision, one can often further improve results with some additional
post-processing that exploits the geometric nature of the underlying task. This
commonly involves displacing the posterior distribution of a CNN in a way that
makes it more appropriate for the task at hand, e.g. better aligned with local
image features, or more compact. In this work we integrate this geometric
post-processing within a deep architecture, introducing a differentiable and
probabilistically sound counterpart to the common geometric voting technique
used for evidence accumulation in vision. We refer to the resulting neural
models as Mass Displacement Networks (MDNs), and apply them to human pose
estimation in two distinct setups: (a) landmark localization, where we collapse
a distribution to a point, allowing for precise localization of body keypoints
and (b) communication across body parts, where we transfer evidence from one
part to the other, allowing for a globally consistent pose estimate. We
evaluate on large-scale pose estimation benchmarks, such as MPII Human Pose and
COCO datasets, and report systematic improvements when compared to strong
baselines.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
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