This book provides a broad survey of advanced pattern recognition techniques for human behavior analysis. Clearly structured, the book begins with concise coverage of the major concepts, before introducing the most frequently used techniques and algorithms in detail, and then discussing examples of real applications. Features: contains contributions from an international selection of experts in the field; presents a thorough introduction to the fundamental topics of human behavior analysis; investigates methods for activity recognition, including gait and posture analysis, hand gesture analysis, and semantics of human behavior in image sequences; provides an accessible psychological treatise on social signals for the analysis of social behaviors; discusses voice and speech analysis, combined audiovisual cues, and social interactions and group dynamics; examines applications in different research fields; each chapter concludes with review questions, a summary of the topics covered, and a glossary.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2016, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in October 2016. The 10 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 initial submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: behavior analysis during play; daily behaviors; gesture and movement analysis; and vision based applications.

Social Signal Processing is the first book to cover all aspects of the modeling, automated detection, analysis, and synthesis of nonverbal behavior in human-human and human-machine interactions. Authoritative surveys address conceptual foundations, machine analysis and synthesis of social signal processing, and applications. Foundational topics include affect perception and interpersonal coordination in communication; later chapters cover technologies for automatic detection and understanding such as computational paralinguistics and facial expression analysis and for the generation of artificial social signals such as social robots and artificial agents. The final section covers a broad spectrum of applications based on social signal processing in healthcare, deception detection, and digital cities, including detection of developmental diseases and analysis of small groups. Each chapter offers a basic introduction to its topic, accessible to students and other newcomers, and then outlines challenges and future perspectives for the benefit of experienced researchers and practitioners in the field.

Semantic Analysis and Understanding of Human Behaviour in Video Streaming investigates the semantic analysis of the human behaviour captured by video streaming, and introduces both theoretical and technological points of view. Video analysis based on the semantic content is in fact still an open issue for the computer vision research community, especially when real-time analysis of complex scenes is concerned. This book explores an innovative, original approach to human behaviour analysis and understanding by using the syntactical symbolic analysis of images and video streaming described by means of strings of symbols. A symbol is associated to each area of the analyzed scene. When a moving object enters an area, the corresponding symbol is appended to the string describing the motion. This approach allows for characterizing the motion of a moving object with a word composed by symbols. By studying and classifying these words we can categorize and understand the various behaviours. The main advantage of this approach lies in the simplicity of the scene and motion descriptions so that the behaviour analysis will have limited computational complexity due to the intrinsic nature both of the representations and the related operations used to manipulate them. Besides, the structure of the representations is well suited for possible parallel processing, thus allowing for speeding up the analysis when appropriate hardware architectures are used. A new methodology for design systems for hierarchical high semantic level analysis of video streaming in narrow domains is also proposed. Guidelines to design your own system are provided in this book. Designed for practitioners, computer scientists and engineers working within the fields of human computer interaction, surveillance, image processing and computer vision, this book can also be used as secondary text book for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering.

Bridging the gap between human-computer engineering and control engineering, Human Behavior Learning and Transfer delineates how to abstract human action and reaction skills into computational models. The authors include methods for modeling a variety of human action and reaction behaviors and explore processes for evaluating, optimizing, and trans

This Special Issue focused on novel vision-based approaches, mainly related to computer vision and machine learning, for the automatic analysis of human behaviour. We solicited submissions on the following topics: information theory-based pattern classification, biometric recognition, multimodal human analysis, low resolution human activity analysis, face analysis, abnormal behaviour analysis, unsupervised human analysis scenarios, 3D/4D human pose and shape estimation, human analysis in virtual/augmented reality, affective computing, social signal processing, personality computing, activity recognition, human tracking in the wild, and application of information-theoretic concepts for human behaviour analysis. In the end, 15 papers were accepted for this special issue. These papers, that are reviewed in this editorial, analyse human behaviour from the aforementioned perspectives, defining in most of the cases the state of the art in their corresponding field.

The psychology classic—a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled—from one of the most influential behaviorists of the twentieth century and the author of Walden Two. “This is an important book, exceptionally well written, and logically consistent with the basic premise of the unitary nature of science. Many students of society and culture would take violent issue with most of the things that Skinner has to say, but even those who disagree most will find this a stimulating book.” —Samuel M. Strong, The American Journal of Sociology “This is a remarkable book—remarkable in that it presents a strong, consistent, and all but exhaustive case for a natural science of human behavior…It ought to be…valuable for those whose preferences lie with, as well as those whose preferences stand against, a behavioristic approach to human activity.” —Harry Prosch, Ethics