This thesis addresses the problem of tracking the focus of attention of people. In particular, a system to track the focus of attention of participants in meetings is developed. Obtaining knowledge about a person’s focus of attention is an important step towards a better understanding of what people do, how and with what or whom they interact or to what they refer. In meetings, focus of attenti...

A multi-image focus of attention mechanism has been developed that can quickly distinguish raised objects like buildings from structured background clutter typical to many aerial image scenarios. The underlying approach is the space-sweep stereo method, in which features from multiple images are backprojected onto a virtual, horizontal plane that is methodically swept through the scene. Backpro...

We present an algorithm to detect the attentive behavior of persons with frequent change in focus of attention (FCFA) from a static video camera. This behavior can be easily perceived by people as temporal changes of human head pose. Here, we propose to use features extracted by analyzing a similarity matrix of head pose by using a self-similarity measure of the head image sequence. Further, we...

Running title: Feature-based attention and pupil size 8 Corresponding Author: 9 Paola Binda, PhD 10 Universita’ di Pisa, Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in 11 Medicine and Surgery 12 via San Zeno 31, 56126 Pisa (Italy) 13 Office: +39-050-3153185 14 [email protected] 15 16 17 The authors declare no competing financial interests 18 19 Acknowledgments 20 This research was...

Emotion in philosophy, psychology and the neurosciences. The journal emphasizes thoughtful analysis of the implications ofboth empirical and experiential (e.g., clinical psychological and phenomenological) approaches to emotion. It will include articles on the implications of empirical findings for an understanding of emotion and consciousness and their interrelations. Consciousness & Emotion i...

In this study, we examined the influence of internal and external attention instructions on the performance of a pitch shot by golfers who were either highly skilled (mean handicap = 4) or low skilled (mean handicap = 26). Ten golfers in each skill group used a 9-iron to pitch a ball as close as possible to an orange pylon, which was located at distances of 10, 15, 20 or 25 m from the golfer. F...

In this paper, we propose a new method for estimating the Visual Focus Of Attention (VFOA) in a video stream captured by a single distant camera and showing several persons sitting around table, like in formal meeting or videoconferencing settings. The visual targets for a given person are automatically extracted on-line using an unsupervised algorithm that incrementally learns the different ap...

This paper presents a study on the recognition of the visual focus of attention (VFOA) of meeting participants based on their head pose. Contrary to previous studies on the topic, in our set-up, the potential VFOA of a person is not restricted to other meeting the participants only, but include environmental targets (including a table, a projection screen). This has two consequences. First, it ...

In our experiments with four well-known systems for solving partially observable planning problems (Contingent-FF, MBP, PKS, and POND), we were greatly surprised to find that they could only solve problems with a small number of contingencies. Apparently they were repeatedly trying to solve many combinations of contingencies at once, thus unnecessarily using up huge amounts of time and space. T...

We have developed a computational model of perceptual attention that interleaves top-down and bottom-up attention processes of an embodied agent in a virtual environment. What has been lacking in our model until now is how it would work when the one of the tasks being performed by the agent is holding a conversation with one or more agents. In this paper, we propose some modifications to our mo...