Research

I am leading the Perception and Activity Understanding group at the Idiap Research Institue. My main research interests are on human activities analysis from multi-modal data. This entails the investigation of fundamental tasks like the detection and tracking of people, the estimation of their pose or the detection of non-verbal behaviors, and the temporal interpretation of this information in forms of gestures, activities, behavior or social relationships. These tasks are addressed through the design of principled algorithms extending models from computer vision, multimodal signal processing, and machine learning, in particular probabilistic graphical models and deep learning techniques. Surveillance, traffic and human behavior analysis,

Some recent publications (full list)

Toward Semantic Gaze Target Detection
S. Tafasca, A. Gupta, V. Bros and J.-M. Odobez
37th Conf. on Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS), December 2024.

MTGS: A Novel Framework for Multi-Person Temporal Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction
A. Gupta, S. Tafasca, A. Farkhondeh, P. Vuillecard and J.-M. Odobez
37th Conf. on Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS), December 2024.

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild
A. Farkhondeh, S. Tafasca and J.-M. Odobez
European Conference on Computer Vision Workshop: Observing and Understanding Hands in Action, September 2024.

Sharingan: A Transformer Architecture for Multi-Person Gaze Following
S. Tafasca, A. Gupta and J.-M. Odobez
Int. Conference Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Seatle, June 2024.

ChildPlay: A New Benchmark for Understanding Children’s Gaze Behaviour
S. Tafasca, A. Gupta and J.-M. Odobez
Int. Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Paris, October 2023.

A Multitask and Kernel approach for Learning to Push Objects with a Target-Parameterized Deep Q-Network
M. Ewerton, M. Villamizar, J. Jankowski, S. Calinon and J.-M. Odobez
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems conference (IROS), 2023.

The AI4Autism Project: A Multimodal and Interdisciplinary Approach to Autism Diagnosis and Stratification
S. Tafasca, A. Gupta, N. Kojovic, M. Gelsomini, T. Maillart, M. Papandrea, M. Schaer and J.-M. Odobez
Int. Conference on Multimodal Interactions (ICMI) workshop on Bridging Social Sciences and AI for Understanding Child Behavior, Paris, October 2023.

Efficient Grapevine Structure Estimation in Vineyards Conditions
T. Gentilhomme, M. Villamizar, J. Corre and J.-M. Odobez
ICCV 8th workshop on Computer Vision in Plant Phenotyping and Agriculture, Paris, October 2023.

Robust Unsupervised Gaze Calibration using Conversation and Manipulation Attention Priors
R. Siegfried and J.-M. Odobez
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, Vol. 18(1), pp 20:1-20:27, 2022.

A Differential Approach for Gaze Estimation
G. Liu, Y. Yu, K. Funes and J.-M. Odobez
in IEEE Transaction of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Vol 43(3): 1092-1099, 2021.

Neural Network Adaptation and Data Augmentation for Multi-Speaker Direction-of-Arrival Estimation
W. He, P. Motlicek and J.-M. Odobez
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol 29:1303-1317, 2021.

Towards an Engagement-Aware Attentive Artificial Listener for Multi-Party Interactions
C. Oertel, P. Jonell, D. Kontogiorgos, K. Funes-Mora, J.-M. Odobez and J. Gustafson
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol. 8, July 2021.