Abstract: First impressions strongly influence social interactions, having a high impact in the personal and professional life. In this paper, we present a deep Classification-Regression Network (CR-Net) for analyzing the Big Five personality problem and further assisting on job interview recommendation in a first impressions setup. The setup is based on the ChaLearn First Impressions dataset, including multimodal data with video, audio, and text converted from the corresponding audio data, where each person is talking in front of a camera. In order to give a comprehensive prediction, we analyze the videos from both the entire scene (including the person’s motions and background) and the face of the person. Our CR-Net first performs personality trait classification and applies a regression later, which can obtain accurate predictions for both personality traits and interview recommendation. Furthermore, we present a new loss function called Bell Loss to address inaccurate predictions caused by the regression-to-the-mean problem. Extensive experiments on the First Impressions dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed network, outperforming the state-of-the-art.

Abstract: Gesture Recognition (GR) is a challenging research area in computer vision. To tackle the annotation bottleneck in GR, we formulate the problem of Zero-Shot Gesture Recognition (ZS-GR) and propose a two-stream model from two input modalities: RGB and Depth videos. To benefit from the vision Transformer capabilities, we use two vision Transformer models, for human detection and visual features representation. We configure a transformer encoder-decoder architecture, as a fast and accurate human detection model, to overcome the challenges of the current human detection models. Considering the human keypoints, the detected human body is segmented into nine parts. A spatio-temporal representation from human body is obtained using a vision Transformer and a LSTM network. A semantic space maps the visual features to the lingual embedding of the class labels via a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. We evaluated the proposed model on five datasets, Montalbano II, MSR Daily Activity 3D, CAD-60, NTU-60, and isoGD obtaining state-of-the-art results compared to state-of-the-art ZS-GR models as well as the Zero-Shot Action Recognition (ZS-AR).

Abstract: Hand sign language recognition from video is a challenging research area in computer vision, which performance is affected by hand occlusion, fast hand movement, illumination changes, or background complexity, just to mention a few. In recent years, deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in the field, though previous challenges are not completely solved. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based pipeline architecture for efficient automatic hand sign language recognition using Single Shot Detector (SSD), 2D Convolutional Neural Network (2DCNN), 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) from RGB input videos. We use a CNN-based model which estimates the 3D hand keypoints from 2D input frames. After that, we connect these estimated keypoints to build the hand skeleton by using midpoint algorithm. In order to obtain a more discriminative representation of hands, we project 3D hand skeleton into three views surface images. We further employ the heatmap image of detected keypoints as input for refinement in a stacked fashion. We apply 3DCNNs on the stacked features of hand, including pixel level, multi-view hand skeleton, and heatmap features, to extract discriminant local spatio-temporal features from these stacked inputs. The outputs of the 3DCNNs are fused and fed to a LSTM to model long-term dynamics of hand sign gestures. Analyzing 2DCNN vs. 3DCNN using different number of stacked inputs into the network, we demonstrate that 3DCNN better capture spatio-temporal dynamics of hands. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that this multi-modal and multi-view set of hand skeleton features are applied for hand sign language recognition. Furthermore, we present a new large-scale hand sign language dataset, namely RKS-PERSIANSIGN, including 10′000 RGB videos of 100 Persian sign words. Evaluation results of the proposed model on three datasets, NYU, First-Person, and RKS-PERSIANSIGN, indicate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in hand sign language recognition, hand pose estimation, and hand action recognition.