Modelling the communication Atmosphere: A human centered multimedia approach to evaluate communicative situations

Abstract

This chapter addresses the problem of multimodal analysis of human face-to-face communication. This is imporant since in the near future, smart environments equipped with multiple sensory systems will be able to sense the presence of humans and assess recognize their behaviours, actions, and emotional states. The main goal of the presented study is to develop models of communicative/interactive events in multimedia (audio and video), suitable for the analysis and subsequent incorporation within virtual reality environments. Interactive, environmental, and emotional characteristics of the communicators are estimated in order to define the communication event as one entity. This is achieved by putting together results obtained in social sciences and multimedia signal processing under one umbrella - the communication atmosphere analysis. Experiments based on real life recordings support the approach. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.