To choose restaurants and coffee shops, people are increasingly relying on social-networking sites. In a popular site such as Foursquare or Yelp, a place comes with descriptions and reviews, and with profile pictures of people who frequent them. Descriptions and reviews have been widely explored in the research area of data mining. By contrast, profile pictures have received little attention. Previous work showed that people are able to partly guess a place's ambiance, clientele, and activities not only by observing the place itself but also by observing the profile pictures of its visitors. Here we further that work by determining which visual cues people may have relied upon to make their guesses; showing that a state-of-the-art algorithm could make predictions more accurately than humans at times; and demonstrating that the visual cues people relied upon partly differ from those of the algorithm.
An approach to the detection and identification of human faces is presented, and a working, near-real-time face recognition system which tracks a subject's head and then recognizes the person by comparing characteristics of the face to those of known individuals is described. This approach treats face recognition as a two-dimensional recognition problem, taking advantage of the fact that faces are normally upright and thus may be described by a small set of 2-D characteristic views. Face images are projected onto a feature space ('face space') that best encodes the variation among known face images. The face space is defined by the 'eigenfaces', which are the eigenvectors of the set of faces; they do not necessarily correspond to isolated features such as eyes, ears, and noses. The framework provides the ability to learn to recognize new faces in an unsupervised manner. > Over the last decade, automatic facial expression analysis has become an active research area that finds potential applications in areas such as more engaging human-computer interfaces, talking heads, image retrieval and human emotion analysis. Facial expressions reflect not only emotions, but other mental activities, social interaction and physiological signals. In this survey we introduce the most prominent automatic facial expression analysis methods and systems presented in the literature. Facial motion and deformation extraction approaches as well as classification methods are discussed with respect to issues such as face normalization, facial expression dynamics and facial expression intensity, but also with regard to their robustness towards environmental changes. In this paper we introduce the novel problem of understanding visual persuasion. Modern mass media make extensive use of images to persuade people to make commercial and political decisions. These effects and techniques are widely studied in the social sciences, but behavioral studies do not scale to massive datasets. Computer vision has made great strides in building syntactical representations of images, such as detection and identification of objects. However, the pervasive use of images for communicative purposes has been largely ignored. We extend the significant advances in syntactic analysis in computer vision to the higher-level challenge of understanding the underlying communicative intent implied in images. We begin by identifying nine dimensions of persuasive intent latent in images of politicians, such as "socially dominant, " "energetic, " and "trustworthy, " and propose a hierarchical model that builds on the layer of syntactical attributes, such as "smile" and "waving hand, " to predict the intents presented in the images. To facilitate progress, we introduce a new dataset of 1, 124 images of politicians labeled with ground-truth intents in the form of rankings. This study demonstrates that a systematic focus on visual persuasion opens up the field of computer vision to a new class of investigations around mediated images, intersecting with media analysis, psychology, and political communication. Despite the evidence that social video conveys rich human personality information, research investigating the automatic prediction of personality impressions in vlogging has shown that, amongst the Big-Five traits, automatic nonverbal behavioral cues are useful to predict mainly the Extraversion trait. This finding, also reported in other conversational settings, indicates that personality information may be coded in other behavioral dimensions like the verbal channel, which has been less studied in multimodal interaction research. In this paper, we address the task of predicting personality impressions from vloggers based on what they say in their YouTube videos. First, we use manual transcripts of vlogs and verbal content analysis techniques to understand the ability of verbal content for the prediction of crowdsourced Big-Five personality impressions. Second, we explore the feasibility of a fully-automatic framework in which transcripts are obtained using automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our results show that the analysis of error-free verbal content is useful to predict four of the Big-Five traits, three of them better than using nonverbal cues, and that the errors caused by the ASR system decrease the performance significantly. Digital portrait photographs are everywhere, and while the number of face pictures keeps growing, not much work has been done to on automatic portrait beauty assessment. In this paper, we design a specific framework to automatically evaluate the beauty of digital portraits. To this end, we procure a large dataset of face images annotated not only with aesthetic scores but also with information about the traits of the subject portrayed. We design a set of visual features based on portrait photography literature, and extensively analyze their relation with portrait beauty, exposing interesting findings about what makes a portrait beautiful. We find that the beauty of a portrait is linked to its artistic value, and independent from age, race and gender of the subject. We also show that a classifier trained with our features to separate beautiful portraits from non-beautiful portraits outperforms generic aesthetic classifiers. Recent research has shown that rapid judgments about the personality traits of political candidates, based solely on their appearance, can predict their electoral success. This suggests that voters rely heavily on appearances when choosing which candidate to elect. Here we review this literature and examine the determinants of the relationship between appearance-based trait inferences and voting. We also reanalyze previous data to show that facial competence is a highly robust and specific predictor of political preferences. Finally, we introduce a computer model of face-based competence judgments, which we use to derive some of the facial features associated with these judgments. Despite the crucial role of physical appearance in forming first impressions, little research has examined the accuracy of personality impressions based on appearance alone. This study examined the accuracy of observers’ impressions on 10 personality traits based on full-body photographs using criterion measures based on self and peer reports. When targets’ posture and expression were constrained (standardized condition), observers’ judgments were accurate for extraversion, self-esteem, and religiosity. When targets were photographed with a spontaneous pose and facial expression (spontaneous condition), observers’ judgments were accurate for almost all of the traits examined. Lens model analyses demonstrated that both static cues (e.g., clothing style) and dynamic cues (e.g., facial expression, posture) offered valuable personality-relevant information. These results suggest that personality is manifested through both static and expressive channels of appearance, and observers use this information to form... This paper describes a face detection framework that is capable of processing images extremely rapidly while achieving high detection rates. There are three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new image representation called the “Integral Image” which allows the features used by our detector to be computed very quickly. The second is a simple and efficient classifier which is built using the AdaBoost learning algorithm (Freund and Schapire, 1995) to select a small number of critical visual features from a very large set of potential features. The third contribution is a method for combining classifiers in a “cascade” which allows background regions of the image to be quickly discarded while spending more computation on promising face-like regions. A set of experiments in the domain of face detection is presented. The system yields face detection performance comparable to the best previous systems (Sung and Poggio, 1998; , 1998; Schneiderman and Kanade, 2000; , 2000). Implemented on a conventional desktop, face detection proceeds at 15 frames per second.