Fast detection of frequent change in focus of human attention

Abstract

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 present a fast algorithm which uses an image vector sequence represented in the principal components subspace instead of the original image sequence to measure the self-similarity. An important feature of the behavior of FCFA is its cyclic pattern where the head pose repeats its position from time to time. A frequency analysis scheme is proposed to find the dynamic characteristics of persons with frequent change of attention or focused attention. A nonparametric classifier is used to classify these two kinds of behaviors (FCFA and focused attention). The fast algorithm discussed in this paper yields real-time performance as well as good accuracy. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.