Automatic social distance estimation for photographic studies: Performance evaluation, test benchmark, and algorithm

The social distancing regulations introduced to slow down the spread of COVID-19 virus directly affect a basic form of non-verbal communication, and there may be longer term impacts on human behavior and culture that remain to be analyzed in proxemics studies. To obtain quantitative results for such studies, large media and/or personal photo collections must be analyzed. Several social distance monitoring methods have been proposed for safety purposes, but they are not directly applicable to general photo collections with large variations in the imaging setup. In such studies, the interest shifts from safety to analyzing subtle differences in social distances. Currently, there is no suitabl…