Abstract: A standard way to deal with multi-class categorization problems is by the combination of binary classifiers in a pairwise voting procedure. Recently, this classical approach has been formalized in the Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In the ECOC framework, the one-versus-one coding demonstrates to achieve higher performance than the rest of coding designs. The binary problems that we train in the one-versus-one strategy are significantly smaller than in the rest of designs, and usually easier to be learnt, taking into account the smaller overlapping between classes. However, a high percentage of the positions coded by zero of the coding matrix, which implies a high sparseness degree, does not codify meta-class membership information. In this paper, we show that using the training data we can redefine without re-training, in a problem-dependent way, the one-versus-one coding matrix so that the new coded information helps the system to increase its generalization capability. Moreover, the new re-coding strategy is generalized to be applied over any binary code. The results over several UCI Machine Learning repository data sets and two real multi-class problems show that performance improvements can be obtained re-coding the classical one-versus-one and Sparse random designs compared to different state-of-the-art ECOC configurations.

Abstract: Article ID 491819
Social Signal Processing is an emergent area of research that focuses on the analysis of social constructs. Dominance and interest are two of these social constructs. Dominance refers to the level of influence a person has in a conversation. Interest, when referred in terms of group interactions, can be defined as the degree of engagement that the members of a group collectively display during their interaction. In this paper, we argue that only using behavioral motion information, we are able to predict the interest of observers when looking at face-to-face interactions as well as the dominant people. First, we propose a simple set of movement-based features from body, face, and mouth activity in order to define a higher set of interaction indicators. The considered indicators are manually annotated by observers. Based on the opinions obtained, we define an automatic binary dominance detection problem and a multiclass interest quantification problem. Error-Correcting Output Codes framework is used to learn to rank the perceived observer's interest in face-to-face interactions meanwhile Adaboost is used to solve the dominant detection problem. The automatic system shows good correlation between the automatic categorization results and the manual ranking made by the observers in both dominance and interest detection problems.

Abstract: Social network analysis became a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore the characteristics of a social network extracted from
multimodal dyadic interactions. First, speech detection is performed through an audio/visual fusion scheme based on stacked sequential learning. In the audio domain, speech is detected through clusterization of audio features. Clusters
are modelled by means of an One-state Hidden Markov Model containing a diagonal covariance Gaussian Mixture Model. In the visual domain, speech detection is performed through differential-based feature extraction from the segmented
mouth region, and a dynamic programming matching procedure. Second, in order to model the dyadic interactions, we employed the Influence Model whose states
encode the previous integrated audio/visual data. Third, the social network is extracted based on the estimated influences. For our study, we used a set of videos belonging to New York Times’ Blogging Heads opinion blog. The results
are reported both in terms of accuracy of the audio/visual data fusion and centrality measures used to characterize the social network.

Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence 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 dominance detection from 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, the considered indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analysis shows a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.

Abstract: This volume presents the results of the Neural Information Processing Systems Competition track at the 2018 NeurIPS conference. The competition follows the same format as the 2017 competition track for NIPS. Out of 21 submitted proposals, eight competition proposals were selected, spanning the area of Robotics, Health, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Systems and Physics. Competitions have become an integral part of advancing state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI). They exhibit one important difference to benchmarks: Competitions test a system end-to-end rather than evaluating only a single component; they assess the practicability of an algorithmic solution in addition to assessing feasibility.

Abstract: This paper surveys the state of the art on multimodal gesture recognition and introduces the JMLR special topic on gesture recognition 2011-2015. We began right at the start of the KinectTMrevolution when inexpensive infrared cameras providing image depth recordings became available. We published papers using this technology and other more conventional methods, including regular video cameras, to record data, thus providing a good overview of uses of machine learning and computer vision using multimodal data in this area of application. Notably, we organized a series of challenges and made available several datasets we recorded for that purpose, including tens of thousands
of videos, which are available to conduct further research. We also overview recent state of the art works on gesture recognition based on a proposed taxonomy for gesture recognition, discussing challenges and future lines of research.

Abstract: This paper reviews the historic of ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) events. We started in 2011 (with the release of the first Kinect device) to run challenges related to human action/activity and gesture recognition. Since then we have regularly organized events in a series of competitions covering all aspects of visual analysis of humans. So far we have organized more than 10 international challenges and events in this field. This paper reviews associated events, and introduces the ChaLearn LAP platform where public resources (including code, data and preprints of papers) related to the organized events are available. We also provide a discussion on perspectives of ChaLearn LAP activities.