Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.

Abstract: This article presents a new approach for gait-based gender recognition using depth cameras, that can run in real time. The main contribution of this study is a new fast feature extraction strategy that uses the 3D point cloud obtained from the frames in a gait cycle. For each frame, these points are aligned according to their centroid and grouped. After that, they are projected into their PCA plane, obtaining a representation of the cycle particularly robust against view changes. Then, final discriminative features are computed by first making a histogram of the projected points and then using linear discriminant analysis. To test the method we have used the DGait database, which is currently the only publicly available database for gait analysis that includes depth information. We have performed experiments on manually labeled cycles and over whole video sequences, and the results show that our method improves the accuracy significantly, compared with state-of-the-art systems which do not use depth information. Furthermore, our approach is insensitive to illumination changes, given that it discards the RGB information. That makes the method especially suitable for real applications, as illustrated in the last part of the experiments section.

Abstract: The problem of training classifiers only with target data arises in many applications where non-target data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Several one-class classification methods have been presented to solve this problem, but most of the methods are highly sensitive to the presence of outliers in the target class. Ensemble methods have therefore been proposed as a powerful way to improve the classification performance of binary/multi-class learning algorithms by introducing diversity into classifiers.
However, their application to one-class classification has been rather limited. In
this paper, we present a new ensemble method based on a non-parametric weighted bagging strategy for one-class classification, to improve accuracy in the presence of outliers. While the standard bagging strategy assumes a uniform data distribution, the method we propose here estimates a probability density based on a forest structure of the data. This assumption allows the estimation of data distribution from the computation of simple univariate and bivariate kernel densities. Experiments using original and noisy versions of 20 different datasets show that bagging ensemble methods applied to different one-class classifiers outperform base one-class classification methods. Moreover, we show that, in noisy versions of the datasets, the non-parametric weighted bagging strategy we propose outperforms the classical bagging strategy in a statistically significant way.