Uncovering Interactions and Interactors: Joint Estimation of Head, Body Orientation and F-Formations From Surveillance Videos

Elisa Ricci, Jagannadan Varadarajan, Ramanathan Subramanian, Samuel Rota Bulo, Narendra Ahuja, Oswald Lanz; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 4660-4668

We present a novel approach for jointly estimating tar- gets' head, body orientations and conversational groups called F-formations from a distant social scene (e.g., a cocktail party captured by surveillance cameras). Differing from related works that have (i) coupled head and body pose learning by exploiting the limited range of orientations that the two can jointly take, or (ii) determined F-formations based on the mutual head (but not body) orientations of in- teractors, we present a unified framework to jointly infer both (i) and (ii). Apart from exploiting spatial and orien- tation relationships, we also integrate cues pertaining to temporal consistency and occlusions, which are beneficial while handling low-resolution data under surveillance set- tings. Efficacy of the joint inference framework reflects via increased head, body pose and F-formation estimation ac- curacy over the state-of-the-art, as confirmed by extensive experiments on two social datasets.