ICPR2014 Workshop
August 24th 2014 - Stockholm Sweden

The retail and advertisement industries are becoming more pervasive, with the need of measuring engagement of viewers/shoppers with newly launched campaigns. The Digital Signage sector represents today the third advertising medium in terms of annual revenues after mobile and online advertising. The trend is exponentially increasing and brands, network aggregators and media planner’s needs are moving toward understanding level of engagement of viewers in order to measure their reaction to new products. While online advertising is mature and has established measurements tools, there are sectors of the sale industry where collecting anonymous information from people is important to measure the effectiveness of a campaign and to take prompt actions to maximize attention grabbing for the ad or the product space. Point of sale and on-shelf solutions are also getting more pervasive due to the needs of measuring how shoppers engage, where attention and gaze estimation in free environment is difficult to perform. Also, measuring the customer experience will allow to stimulate a multidisciplinary approach which will bring ethologists, psycologists, marketing and media planner professionals , to study and understand social behaviours of social media and to propose new audience measurement metrics.

Video analytics may help understanding the effectiveness of the branded message by studying and measuring public opinion and polling, geographical concentration of conversation of viewers. To this aim, computer vision and pattern recognition technologies will play an important role in audience measurement for their capability of understanding from visual cues demographics, gaze, dwell time, affect state and group proxemics, where low spatial-resolution, pose changes, occlusions, illumination changes, large variability of intra-class female age and ethnicity cohorts are critical aspects for recognition.

The aim of this workshop is to provide an overview of state of the art methods for audience measurements in retail and Digital Signage, end-users attraction, and stimulate the creation of appropriate benchmark dataset to be used as reference for the development of novel audience measurement algorithms. Papers are invited under the following topics (but not limited to):

· Dwell time estimation
· Gender recognition
· Age and Age group estimation
· Behaviour analysis
· People counting in multi-camera network
· People recurrence in long time window
· Ethnicity recognition
· Emotion analysis
· Free eye gaze estimation
· Group of related people: detection, tracking and behaviour analysis
· Path optimization and queue management in the point of sale
· Annotated Dataset proposal
· Privacy preserving in Audience Measurement
· Other visual cues for customer profiling

Accompanying Demo is also encouraged to be shown in the scheduled Demo session.
There will be an industry-Academia roundtable in the afternoon

Accepted Papers will be published by Springer LNCS post-proceedings

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: april 11 2014
Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2014
Revised paper submission: July 1, 2014


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Sebastiano Battiato University of Catania IT
Andrea Cavallaro Queen Mary University of London UK
Cosimo Distante National Institute of Optics - CNR IT

TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Anil Anthony Bharath Imperial College of London UK
Modesto Castrillón-Santana University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria ES
Rama Chellappa University of Maryland USA
Rita Cucchiara University of Modena & Reggio Emilia IT
Giovanni M. Farinella University of Catania IT
Kenneth Funes Idiap Research Institute CH
Luiz M. Garcia Gonçalves Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte BR
Guodong Guo West Virginia University USA
Abdenour Hadid University of Oulu FI
Hu Han Michigan State University USA
Giovanni Indiveri University of Salento IT
Marco Leo National Institute of Optics - CNR IT
Pier Luigi Mazzeo National Institute of Optics - CNR IT
Javier Lorenzo Navarro University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Giovanni Puglisi University of Catania IT
Robert Ravnik University of Ljubljana SLO
Marios Savvides Carnegie Mellon University USA
Paolo Spagnolo National Institute of Optics - CNR IT
Oscar Deniz Suarez Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha ES
Dit-Yan Yeung Hong Kong University of Science and Technology PRC

For more information: http://www.ino.it/vaam