Abstract
One of the main and most effective measures to contain the recent viral outbreak is the maintenance of the so-called Social Distancing (SD). To comply with this constraint, governments are adopting restrictions over the minimum inter-personal distance between people. Given this actual scenario, it is crucial to massively measure the compliance to such physical constraint in our life, in order to figure out the reasons of the possible breaks of such distance limitations, and understand if this implies a potential threat. To this end, we introduce the Visual Social Distancing (VSD) problem, defined as the automatic estimation of the inter-personal distance from an image, and the characterization of related people aggregations. VSD is pivotal for a non-invasive analysis to whether people comply with the SD restriction, and to provide statistics about the level of safety of specific areas whenever this constraint is violated. We first point out that measuring VSD is not only a geometrical problem, but it also implies a deeper understanding of the social behaviour in the scene. The aim is to truly detect potentially dangerous situations while avoiding false alarms (e.g., a family with children or relatives, an elder with their caregivers), all of this by complying with current privacy policies. We then discuss how VSD relates with previous literature in Social Signal Processing and indicate a path to research new Computer Vision methods that can possibly provide a solution to such problem. We conclude with future challenges related to the effectiveness of VSD systems, ethical implications and future application scenarios.
Highlights
Humans are social species as demonstrated by the fact that in everyday life people continuously interact with each other to achieve goals, or to exchange states of mind
The focus of this paper lies on Visual Social Distancing (VSD), i.e. on approaches relying on video cameras and other imaging sensors to analyse the proxemic behaviour of people
We pointed out that VSD is a Computer Vision problem related to geometrical proxemic since people distancing has to be weighted given the social context in the current scene
Summary
Humans are social species as demonstrated by the fact that in everyday life people continuously interact with each other to achieve goals, or to exchange states of mind. As can be noticed, behavior, social interactions, and space arrangements are tightly coupled, and affect each other This is why it is important to take into consideration all these aspects when constraints in this respect are to be imposed, in particular when people health is in play. For all these reasons, the focus of this paper lies on Visual Social Distancing (VSD), i.e. on approaches relying on video cameras and other imaging sensors (see Fig. 1 for an example) to analyse the proxemic behaviour of people.
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