MultiMediate: Multi-modal Group Behaviour Analysis for Artificial Mediation

Anticipating Averted Gaze in Dyadic Interactions

Philipp Müller, Ekta Sood, Andreas Bulling

Proc. ACM International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA), pp. 1-10, 2020.


Abstract

We present the first method to anticipate averted gaze in natural dyadic interactions. The task of anticipating averted gaze, i.e. that a person will not make eye contact in the near future, remains unsolved despite its importance for human social encounters as well as a number of applications, including human-robot interaction or conversational agents. Our multimodal method is based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) network that analyses non-verbal facial cues and speaking behaviour. We empirically evaluate our method for different future time horizons on a novel dataset of 121 YouTube videos of dyadic video conferences (74 hours in total). We investigate person-specific and person-independent performance and demonstrate that our method clearly outperforms baselines in both settings. As such, our work sheds light on the tight interplay between eye contact and other non-verbal signals and underlines the potential of computational modelling and anticipation of averted gaze for interactive applications.

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BibTeX

@inproceedings{mueller20_etra, title = {Anticipating Averted Gaze in Dyadic Interactions}, author = {Müller, Philipp and Sood, Ekta and Bulling, Andreas}, year = {2020}, booktitle = {Proc. ACM International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA)}, doi = {10.1145/3379155.3391332}, pages = {1-10} }