Decoding Children's Social Behavior

We introduce a new problem domain for activity recognition: the analysis of children's social and communicative behaviors based on video and audio data. We specifically target interactions between children aged 1-2 years and an adult. Such interactions arise naturally in the diagnosis and treatment of developmental disorders such as autism. We introduce a new publicly-available dataset containing over 160 sessions of a 3-5 minute child-adult interaction. In each session, the adult examiner followed a semi-structured play interaction protocol which was designed to elicit a broad range of social behaviors. We identify the key technical challenges in analyzing these behaviors, and describe met…