Group Leadership Estimation Based on Influence of Pointing Actions

When we act in a group with family members, friends, colleagues, each group member often play the respective role to achieve a goal that all group members have in common. This paper focuses on leadership among various kinds of roles observed in a social group and proposes a method to estimate a leader based on an interaction analysis. In order to estimate a leader in a group, we extract pointing actions of each person and measure how other people change their actions triggered by the pointing actions, i.e. how much influence the pointing actions have. When we can see the tendency that one specific person makes pointing actions and the actions have a high influence on another member, it is very likely that the person is a leader in a group. The proposed method is based on this intuition and measures the influence of pointing actions using their motion trajectories. We demonstrate that the proposed method has a potential for estimating the leadership through a comparison between the computed influence measures and subjective evaluations using some actual videos taken in a science museum.