Heatmapping of Group People Involved in the Group Activity

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for heatmapping people who are involved in a group activity. Such people grouping is useful for understanding group activities. In prior work, people grouping is performed based on simple inflexible rules and schemes (e.g., based on proximity among people and with models representing only a constant number of people). In addition, several previous grouping methods require the results of action recognition for individual people, which may include erroneous results. On the other hand, our proposed heatmapping method can group any number of people who dynamically change their deployment. Our method can work independently of individual action recognition. A deep network for our proposed method consists of two input streams (i.e., RGB and human bounding-box images). This network outputs a heatmap representing pixelwise confidence values of the people grouping. Extensive exploration of appropriate parameters was conducted in order to optimize the input bounding-box images. As a result, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for heatmapping people involved in group activities.