Co-occurrence graphs

Head pose and gesture offer several conversational grounding cues and are used extensively in face-to-face interaction among people. To accurately recognize visual feedback, humans often use contextual knowledge from previous and current events to anticipate when feedback is most likely to occur. In this paper we describe how contextual information from other participants can be used to predict visual feedback and improve recognition of head gestures in multiparty interactions (e.g., meetings). An important contribution of this paper is our data-driven representation, called co-occurrence graphs, which models co-occurrence between contextual cues such as spoken words and pauses, and visual head gestures. By analyzing these co-occurrence patterns we can automatically select relevant contextual features and predict when visual gestures are more likely. Using a discriminative approach to multi-modal integration, our contextual representation using co-occurrence graph improves head gesture recognition performance on a publicly available dataset of multi-party interactions.