VISAGE: A Support Vector Machine Approach to Group Dynamic Analysis

A group is defined as a collective entity usually consisting of two or more individuals each connected by social relationships. The term ´group dynamics´ was originally coined by social psychologist Kurt Lewin to describe the positive and negative forces within groups of people. Its study is useful today in a wide variety of applications such as gaining a better understanding of decision making behavior or evaluating the health of workplace environments. Metrics need to be defined to measure the quality of relations in a group by performing an analysis on each individual member of the group. Previous research in the field performs this through the means of surveying (generally through questionnaires) each member of the group. In this project we propose a novel method to analyze group dynamics from a single static image by performing automated facial expression recognition.