Detection of social interaction from observation of daily living environments

In this article, we discuss how to detect occasional social interaction by a group of people in an open space such as a hall by observing the environment by cameras. Since it is known in the field of social psychology that some characteristic arrangement is maintained by each group of people during interaction, previous works have tried to detect social interaction based on the arrangement. However, these methods could confuse different groups especially when those groups are located close to each other, because the methods only consider direct relationship among the positions or orientations of the people for finding the characteristic arrangement. We propose a new region-based approach, which focuses on the spatial region to be occupied exclusively by each group of the people, introducing a technique for region extraction used in the field of image processing.