Predicting the dominant clique in meetings through fusion of nonverbal cues

This paper addresses the novel problem of automatically predicting the dominant clique (i.e., the set of K-dominant people) in face-to-face small group meetings recorded by multiple audio and video sensors. For this goal, we present a framework that integrates automatically extracted nonverbal cues and dominance prediction models. Easily computable audio and visual activity nonverbal cues are automatically extracted from cameras and microphones. Such nonverbal cues, correlated to human display and perception of dominance, are well documented in the social psychology literature. The effectiveness of the cues were systematically investigated as single cues as well as in unimodal and multimodal combinations using unsupervised and supervised learning approaches for dominant clique estimation. Our framework was evaluated on a five-hour public corpus of teamwork meetings with third-party manual annotation of perceived dominance.