Abstract: During face-to-face human interaction, nonverbal communication plays a fundamental role. A relevant aspect that takes part during social interactions is represented by mirroring, in which a person tends to mimic the non-verbal behavior (head and body gestures, vocal prosody, etc.) of the counterpart. In this paper, we introduce a computer vision-based system to detect mirroring in dyadic social interactions with the use of a wearable platform. In our context, mirroring is inferred as simultaneous head noddings displayed by the interlocutors. Our approach consists of the following steps: (1) facial features extraction; (2) facial features stabilization; (3) head nodding recognition; and (4) mirroring detection. Our system achieves a mirroring detection accuracy of 72% on a custom mirroring dataset.

Abstract: PR4883, PII: S0031-3203(13)00327-0
Two-dimensional shape models have been successfully applied to solve many problems in computer vision, such as object tracking, recognition, and segmentation. Typically, 2D shape models are learned from a discrete set of image landmarks (corresponding to projection of 3D points of an object), after applying Generalized Procustes Analysis (GPA) to remove 2D rigid transformations. However, the
standard GPA process suffers from three main limitations. Firstly, the 2D training samples do not necessarily cover a uniform sampling of all the 3D transformations of an object. This can bias the estimate of the shape model. Secondly, it can be computationally expensive to learn the shape model by sampling 3D transformations. Thirdly, standard GPA methods use only one reference shape, which can might be insufficient to capture large structural variability of some objects.
To address these drawbacks, this paper proposes continuous generalized Procrustes analysis (CGPA).
CGPA uses a continuous formulation that avoids the need to generate 2D projections from all the rigid 3D transformations. It builds an efficient (in space and time) non-biased 2D shape model from a set of 3D model of objects. A major challenge in CGPA is the need to integrate over the space of 3D rotations, especially when the rotations are parameterized with Euler angles. To address this problem, we introduce the use of the Haar measure. Finally, we extended CGPA to incorporate several reference shapes. Experimental results on synthetic and real experiments show the benefits of CGPA over GPA.

Abstract: Intestinal contractions are one of the most important events to diagnose motility pathologies of the small intestine. When visualized by wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE), the sequence of frames that represents a contraction is characterized by a clear wrinkle structure in the central frames that corresponds to the folding of the intestinal wall. In this paper we present a new method to robustly detect wrinkle frames in full WCE videos by using a new mid-level image descriptor that is based on a centrality measure proposed for graphs. We present an extended validation, carried out in a very large database, that shows that the proposed method achieves state of the art performance for this task.