In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science

Irteza Nasir

will defend his thesis

A Study Of Visual Attention on Gestures and Motion During Infancy

Abstract

Understanding development of children’s visual attention and the role of vision in object name learning have been important in developmental studies over the years. Many approaches have been tried to understand what are the factors that generate attention in infants. Analysing videos taken from different perspectives have been increasingly useful in such studies as they provide new insights. Nevertheless, analyzing these videos frame by frame is time consuming and unmanageable. Moreover, it is difficult for humans to assess all of the parameters that impact child's visual attention. In this thesis, we have proposed a tool for extracting and analysing the motions from videos of child-parent toy play. We have focused primarily on the third perspective videos. The approach first extracts dense trajectories from these videos, and then uses unsupervised clustering to group the trajectories into multiple groups. These groups are then analyzed to explore potential correlations between the motions of the parents and the attention of the child. The proposed tool will enable researchers to look into unknown patterns that might contribute into the development of children’s visual attention by analyzing child-parent toy play videos.

Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Time: 4:00 PM
Place: PGH 550
Advisor: Dr. Shishir Shah

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.