While watching movies, audience members exhibit both subtle and coarse gestures (e.g., smiles, head-pose change, fidgeting, stretching) which convey sentiment (i.e., engaged or disengaged) during feature length movies. Noticing these behaviors using computer vision systems is a very challenging problem-especially in a movie theatre environment. The environment is dark and contains views of people at different scales and viewpoints. Feature length movies typically run 80-120 minutes, and tracking people uninterrupted for this duration is still an unsolved problem. Facial expressions of audience members are subtle, short, and sparse; making it difficult to detect and recognize activities. Finally, annotating audience sentiment at the frame-level is prohibitively time consuming. To circumvent these issues, we use an infrared illuminated test-bed to obtain a visually uniform input of audiences watching feature length movies. We present a method which can automatically detect the change in behavior (key-gestures) using “key-frames”, which can convey audience sentiment. As the number of key-frames are many orders of magnitudes lower than the number of frames, the annotation problem is reduced to assigning a sentiment label for each key-frame. Using these discovered key-gestures, we create a movie rating classifier from crowd-sourced ratings and demonstrate its predictive capability. Our dataset consists of over 50 hours of audience behavior collected across 237 subjects.

Matrix and tensor factorization methods are often used for finding underlying low-dimensional patterns from noisy data. In this paper, we study non-linear tensor factorization methods based on deep variational autoencoders. Our approach is well-suited for settings where the relationship between the latent representation to be learned and the raw data representation is highly complex. We apply our approach to a large dataset of facial expressions of movie-watching audiences (over 16 million faces). Our experiments show that compared to conventional linear factorization methods, our method achieves better reconstruction of the data, and further discovers interpretable latent factors.

We propose a method of representing audience behavior through facial and body motions from a single video stream, and use these features to predict the rating for feature-length movies. This is a very challenging problem as: i) the movie viewing environment is dark and contains views of people at different scales and viewpoints; ii) the duration of feature-length movies is long (80-120 mins) so tracking people uninterrupted for this length of time is still an unsolved problem; and iii) expressions and motions of audience members are subtle, short and sparse making labeling of activities unreliable. To circumvent these issues, we use an infrared illuminated test-bed to obtain a visually uniform input. We then utilize motion-history features which capture the subtle movements of a person within a pre-defined volume, and then form a group representation of the audience by a histogram of pair-wise correlations over a small-window of time. Using this group representation, we learn our movie rating classifier from crowd-sourced ratings collected by rottentomatoes.com and show our prediction capability on audiences from 30 movies across 250 subjects (> 50 hrs).

In this paper, we propose a framework for both gradient descent image and object alignment in the Fourier domain. Our method centers upon the classical Lucas & Kanade (LK) algorithm where we represent the source and template/model in the complex 2D Fourier domain rather than in the spatial 2D domain. We refer to our approach as the Fourier LK (FLK) algorithm. The FLK formulation is advantageous when one preprocesses the source image and template/model with a bank of filters (e.g., oriented edges, Gabor, etc.) as 1) it can handle substantial illumination variations, 2) the inefficient preprocessing filter bank step can be subsumed within the FLK algorithm as a sparse diagonal weighting matrix, 3) unlike traditional LK, the computational cost is invariant to the number of filters and as a result is far more efficient, and 4) this approach can be extended to the Inverse Compositional (IC) form of the LK algorithm where nearly all steps (including Fourier transform and filter bank preprocessing) can be precomputed, leading to an extremely efficient and robust approach to gradient descent image matching. Further, these computational savings translate to nonrigid object alignment tasks that are considered extensions of the LK algorithm, such as those found in Active Appearance Models (AAMs).

Gaining invariance to camera and illumination variations has been a well investigated topic in Active Appearance Model (AAM) fitting literature. The major problem lies in the inability of the appearance parameters of the AAM to generalize to unseen conditions. An attractive approach for gaining invariance is to fit an AAM to a multiple filter response (e.g. Gabor) representation of the input image. Naively applying this concept with a traditional AAM is computationally prohibitive, especially as the number of filter responses increase. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient AAM fitting algorithm based on the Lucas-Kanade (LK) algorithm posed in the Fourier domain that affords invariance to both expression and illumination. We refer to this as a Fourier AAM (FAAM), and show that this method gives substantial improvement in person specific AAM fitting performance over traditional AAM fitting methods.

The use of visual features in the form of lip movements to improve the performance of acoustic speech recognition has been shown to work well, particularly in noisy acoustic conditions.However, whether this technique can outperform speech recognition incorporating well-known acoustic enhancement techniques, such as spectral subtraction, or multi-channel beamforming is not known.This is an important question to be answered especially in an automotive environment, for the design of an efficient human-vehicle computer interface.We perform a variety of speech recognition experiments on a challenging automotive speech dataset and results show that synchronous HMM-based audio-visual fusion can outperform traditional single as well as multi-channel acoustic speech enhancement techniques.We also show that further improvement in recognition performance can be obtained by fusing speech-enhanced audio with the visual modality, demonstrating the complementary nature of the two robust speech recognition approaches.