Analyzing Groups: A Social Signaling Perspective

This chapter introduces some basic methods to deal with groups of people in surveillance settings. Recently, modeling groups has become a very active trend for video surveillance researchers. Our solution is proper of the recently forged field of social signaling, since it embeds notions of social psychology into computer vision techniques, offering a novel research perspective for the video surveillance community. In particular, we present methods to discover and track groups of people, and to infer what is the focus of attention of each person, that is, we estimate the portion of a scene that is frequently observed by people. Each method we present is evaluated in an experimental section on real scenario, that gives a clear idea of its performance and potentialities.