Wenchuan Wei

Onur N. Tepencelik, Wenchuan Wei, Pamela C. Cosman et al.

We propose a system that estimates people's body and head orientations using low-resolution point cloud data from two LiDAR sensors. Our models make accurate estimations in real-world conversation settings where subjects move naturally with varying head and body poses, while seated around a table. The body orientation estimation model uses ellipse fitting while the head orientation estimation model combines geometric feature extraction with an ensemble of neural network regressors. Our models achieve a mean absolute estimation error of 5.2 degrees for body orientation and 13.7 degrees for head orientation. Compared to other body/head orientation estimation systems that use RGB cameras, our proposed system uses LiDAR sensors to preserve user privacy, while achieving comparable accuracy. Unlike other body/head orientation estimation systems, our sensors do not require a specified close-range placement in front of the subject, enabling estimation from a surveillance viewpoint which produces low-resolution data. This work is the first to attempt head orientation estimation using point clouds in a low-resolution surveillance setting. We compare our model to two state-of-the-art head orientation estimation models that are designed for high-resolution point clouds, which yield higher estimation errors on our low-resolution dataset. We also present an application of head orientation estimation by quantifying behavioral differences between neurotypical and autistic individuals in triadic (three-way) conversations. Significance tests show that autistic individuals display significantly different behavior compared to neurotypical individuals in distributing attention between conversational parties, suggesting that the approach could be a component of a behavioral analysis or coaching system.

Mingyuan Jiu, Hailong Zhu, Wenchuan Wei et al.

Context modeling is crucial for visual recognition, enabling highly discriminative image representations by integrating both intrinsic and extrinsic relationships between objects and labels in images. A limitation in current approaches is their focus on basic geometric relationships or localized features, often neglecting cross-scale contextual interactions between objects. This paper introduces the Deep Panoptic Context Aggregation Network (PanCAN), a novel approach that hierarchically integrates multi-order geometric contexts through cross-scale feature aggregation in a high-dimensional Hilbert space. Specifically, PanCAN learns multi-order neighborhood relationships at each scale by combining random walks with an attention mechanism. Modules from different scales are cascaded, where salient anchors at a finer scale are selected and their neighborhood features are dynamically fused via attention. This enables effective cross-scale modeling that significantly enhances complex scene understanding by combining multi-order and cross-scale context-aware features. Extensive multi-label classification experiments on NUS-WIDE, PASCAL VOC2007, and MS-COCO benchmarks demonstrate that PanCAN consistently achieves competitive results, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, thereby substantially improving multi-label classification performance.