Being the center of attention: A Person-Context CNN framework for Personality Recognition

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel study on personality recognition using video data from different scenarios. Our goal is to jointly model nonverbal behavioral cues with contextual information for a robust, multi-scenario, personality recognition system. Therefore, we build a novel multi-stream Convolutional Neural Network framework (CNN), which considers multiple sources of information. From a given scenario, we extract spatio-temporal motion descriptors from every individual in the scene, spatio-temporal motion descriptors encoding social group dynamics, and proxemics descriptors to encode the interaction with the surrounding context. All the proposed descriptors are mapped to the same feature space facilitating the overall learning effort. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of jointly modeling the mutual Person-Context information, outperforming the state-of-the art-results for personality recognition in two different scenarios. Lastly, we present CNN class activation maps for each personality trait, shedding light on behavioral patterns linked with personality attributes.