Abstract
This paper presents a study on the recognition of the visual focus of attention (VFOA) of meeting participants based on their head pose. Contrarily to previous studies on the topic, in our set-up, the potential VFOA of people is not restricted to other meeting participants only, but includes environmental targets (table, slide screen). This has two consequences. Firstly, this increases the number of possible ambiguities in identifying the VFOA from the head pose. Secondly, due to our particular set-up, the identification of the VFOA from head pose can not rely on an incomplete representation of the pose (the pan), but requests the knowledge of the full head pointing information (pan and tilt). In this paper, using a corpus of 8 meetings of 8 minutes on average, featuring 4 persons involved in the discussion of statements projected on a slide screen, we analyze the above issues by evaluating, through numerical performance measures, the recognition of the VFOA from head pose information obtained either using a magnetic sensor device (the ground truth) or a vision based tracking system (head pose estimates). The results clearly show that in complex but realistic situations, it is quite optimistic to believe that the recognition of the VFOA can solely be based on the head pose, as some previous studies had suggested.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ba, S.O., Odobez, J.-M.: A Rao-Blackwellized Mixed State Particle Filter for Head Pose Tracking. in Meetings. In: Proc. of ACM ICMI Workshop on Multi-modal Multi-party Meeting Processing (MMMP), Trento, Italy, October 7 (2005)
Brown, L., Tian, Y.: A study of Coarse Head Pose Estimation. In: Proc. of IEEE Workshop on Motion and Video Computing, Orlando, Florida (December 2002)
Danninger, M., Vertegaal, R., Siewiorek, D.P., Mamuji, A.: Using Social geometry to manage interruptions and co-worker attention in office environments. In: Proc. of Conference on Graphics Interface, Victoria, British Columbia (2005)
Duncan Jr., S.: Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 23(2), 283–292 (1972)
Gourier, N., Hall, D., CrowleyJ., L.: Estimating face orientation from robust detection of salient facial features. In: Proc. of Pointing 2004, ICPR, International Workshop on Visual Observation of Deictic Gestures, Cambridge, UK
Heylen, D.: Challenges ahead head movements and other social acts in conversation. In: Proc. of the Joint Symposium on Virtual Social Agent (2005)
Langton, S.R.H., Watt, R.J., Bruce, V.: Do the eyes have it? Cues to the direction of social attention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(2), 50–58 (2000)
Langton, S.R.H.: The mutual influence of gaze and head orientation in the analysis of social attention direction. Quarterly Jl of Exp. Psychology 53A(3), 825–845 (2000)
Matsumoto, Y., Ogasawara, T., Zelinsky, A.: Behavior recognition based on head pose and gaze direction measurement. In: Conf. on Intel. Robots and Sys. (2002)
MacGrath, J.E.: Groups: Interaction and performances. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewoods Cliffs (1984)
Novick, D., Hansen, B., Ward, K.: Coordinating turn taking with gaze. In: Proc. of International Conf. on Spoken Language Processing (October 1996)
Otsuka, K., Takemae, Y., Yamato, J., Murase, H.: A probabilistic inference of multi party-conversation structure based on Markov switching models of gaze patterns, head direction and utterance. In: Proc. of International Conf. On Multi-modal and Interfaces, Trento (2005)
Pieters, R.G.M., Rosbergen, E., Hartog, M.: Visual attention to advertising: The impact of motivation and repetition. In: Proc. of Conf. on Advances in Consumer Research (1995)
Rabiner, L.R.: A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition. Readings in Speech Recognition, 267–296 (1990)
Smith, P., Shah, M., da Vitoria Lobo, N.: Determining driver visuual attention with one camera. IEEE Trans. on Intel. Transportation Systems 4(4), 205–218 (2004)
Smith, K., Ba, S., Gatica-Perez, D., Odobez, J.M.: Multi-Person Wandering-Focus-of-Attention Tracking. IDIAP Research Report 80 (November 2005)
Stiefelhagen, R., Yang, J., Waibel, A.: Modeling focus of attention for meeting indexing based on multiple cues. IEEE Trans. on Neural Net. 13(4) (2002)
Zhang, D., Gatica-Perez, D., Bengio, S., McCowan, I.: Modeling Individual and Group Actions in Meetings with Layered HMMs. IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (June 2006)
Flock of Birds, http://www.ascension-tech.com/products/flockofbirds.php
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ba, S.O., Odobez, JM. (2006). A Study on Visual Focus of Attention Recognition from Head Pose in a Meeting Room. In: Renals, S., Bengio, S., Fiscus, J.G. (eds) Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction. MLMI 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4299. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11965152_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11965152_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69267-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69268-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)