Title
Developing an Engagement-Aware System for the Detection of Unfocused Interaction
Abstract
We introduce a perception system for social robots that is able to detect a person's engagement in an interaction from nonverbal cues independently of principal user activity. This was achieved by the introduction of a set of proxemics, body posture and attention features relevant for human-human interaction. The features were extracted from RGB-D image data of a single Kinect and utilized to train two separate machine learning models. Multiple system configurations and feature combinations were tested, and their impact on the detection of user engagement evaluated. Combining all features, our perception system reaches an F1-score of 81% when estimating an observed person's interaction intent through binary classification. Regression of a user's level of availability deviates from the given ground truth values by 13.27% on average. Finally, a prototype was implemented which is able to simultaneously run both previous estimates in real-time using a shared feature vector. In the following, the proposed system shall be used to design robots whose behavior shows their awareness of user engagement.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/RO-MAN50785.2021.9515353
2021 30TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOT AND HUMAN INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION (RO-MAN)
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
1944-9445
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marvin Brenner100.34
Heike Brock214.47
Andreas Stiegler300.34
Randy Gomez47628.11