Egocentric Vision for Detecting Social Relationships

Social interactions are so natural that we rarely stop wondering who is interacting with whom or which people are gathering into a group and who are not. Nevertheless, humans naturally do that neglecting that the complexity of this task increases when only visual cues are available. Different situations need different behaviors: while we accept to stand in close proximity to strangers when we at- tend some kind of public event, we would feel uncomfortable in having people we do not know close to us when we have a coffee. In fact, we rarely exchange mutual gaze with people we are not interacting with, an important clue when trying to discern different social clusters. We address the problem of partitioning people in a video sequence into socially related groups from an egocentric vision (from now on, ego-vision) perspective. Human behavior is by no means random: when interacting with each other we generally stand in determined positions to avoid occlusions in our […]