Ahmad Hammoudeh


2022

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Analysis of Co-Laughter Gesture Relationship on RGB Videos in Dyadic Conversation Context
Hugo Bohy | Ahmad Hammoudeh | Antoine Maiorca | Stéphane Dupont | Thierry Dutoit
Proceedings of the Workshop on Smiling and Laughter across Contexts and the Life-span within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The development of virtual agents has enabled human-avatar interactions to become increasingly rich and varied. Moreover, an expressive virtual agent i.e. that mimics the natural expression of emotions, enhances social interaction between a user (human) and an agent (intelligent machine). The set of non-verbal behaviors of a virtual character is, therefore, an important component in the context of human-machine interaction. Laughter is not just an audio signal, but an intrinsic relationship of multimodal non-verbal communication, in addition to audio, it includes facial expressions and body movements. Motion analysis often relies on a relevant motion capture dataset, but the main issue is that the acquisition of such a dataset is expensive and time-consuming. This work studies the relationship between laughter and body movements in dyadic conversations between two interlocutors. The body movements were extracted from videos using deep learning based pose estimator model. We found that, in the explored NDC-ME dataset, a single statistical feature (i.e, the maximum value, or the maximum of Fourier transform) of a joint movement weakly correlates with laughter intensity by 30%. However, we did not find a direct correlation between audio features and body movements. We discuss about the challenges to use such dataset for the audio-driven co-laughter motion synthesis task.

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Are There Any Body-movement Differences between Women and Men When They Laugh?
Ahmad Hammoudeh | Antoine Maiorca | Stéphane Dupont | Thierry Dutoit
Proceedings of the Workshop on Smiling and Laughter across Contexts and the Life-span within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Smiling differences between men and women have been studied in psychology. Women smile more than men although the expressiveness of women is not universally more across all facial actions. There are also body movement differences between women and men. For example, more open-body postures were reported for men, but are there any body-movement differences between men and women when they laugh? To investigate this question, we study body-movement signals extracted from recorded laughter videos using a deep learning pose estimation model. Initial results showed a higher Fourier Transform amplitude of thorax and shoulder movements for females while males had a higher Fourier transform amplitude of Elbow movement. The differences were not limited to a small frequency range but covered most of the frequency spectrum. However, further investigations are still needed.