@inproceedings{hedayati2020reform,
author = {Hedayati, Hooman and Muehlbradt, Annika and Szafir, Daniel J. and Andrist, Sean},
title = {REFORM: Recognizing F-formations for Social Robots},
booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020)},
year = {2020},
month = {August},
abstract = {Recognizing and understanding conversational groups, or F-formations, is a critical task for situated agents designed to interact with humans. F-formations contain complex structures and dynamics, yet are used intuitively by people in everyday face-to-face conversations. Prior research exploring ways of identifying F-formations has largely relied on heuristic algorithms that may not capture the rich dynamic behaviors employed by humans. We introduce REFORM (REcognize F-FORmations with Machine learning), a data-driven approach for detecting F-formations given human and agent positions and orientations. REFORM decomposes the scene into all possible pairs and then reconstructs F-formations with a voting-based scheme. We evaluated our approach across three datasets: the SALSA dataset, a newly collected human-only dataset, and a new set of acted human-robot scenarios, and found that REFORM yielded improved accuracy over a state-of-the-art F-formation detection algorithm. We also introduce symmetry and tightness as quantitative measures to characterize F-formations. Supplementary video: this https URL , Dataset available at: this http URL},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/reform-recognizing-f-formations-for-social-robots/},
}