Talking heads: Detecting humans and recognizing their interactions

The objective of this work is to accurately and efficiently detect configurations of one or more people in edited TV material. Such configurations often appear in standard arrangements due to cinematic style, and we take advantage of this to provide scene context. We make the following contributions: first, we introduce a new learnable context aware configuration model for detecting sets of people in TV material that predicts the scale and location of each upper body in the configuration, second, we show that inference of the model can be solved globally and efficiently using dynamic programming, and implement a maximum margin learning framework, and third, we show that the configuration model substantially outperforms a Deformable Part Model (DPM) for predicting upper body locations in video frames, even when the DPM is equipped with the context of other upper bodies. Experiments are performed over two datasets: the TV Human Interaction dataset, and 150 episodes from four different TV shows. We also demonstrate the benefits of the model in recognizing interactions in TV shows.