A Semi-Automated System for Accurate Gaze Coding in Natural Dyadic Interactions

In this paper we propose a system capable of accurately coding gazing events in natural dyadic interactions. Contrary to previous works, our approach exploits the actual continuous gaze direction of a participant by leveraging on remote RGB-D sensors and a head pose-independent gaze estimation method. Our contributions are: i) we propose a systemsetup built from low-cost sensors and a technique to easily calibrate these sensors in a room with minimal assumptions; ii) we propose a method which, provided short manual annotations, can automatically detect gazing events in the rest of the sequence; iii) we demonstrate on substantially long, natural dyadic data that high accuracy can be obtained, showing the potential of our system. Our approach is non-invasive and does not require collaboration from the interactors. These characteristics are highly valuable in psychology and sociology research.