Moving as a Leader: Detecting Emergent Leadership in Small Groups using Body Pose

Detecting leadership while understanding the underlying be- havior is an important research topic particularly for social and organizational psychology, and has started to get at- tention from social signal processing research community as well. It is known that, visual activity is a useful cue to investigate the social interactions, even though previously applied nonverbal features based on head/body actions were not performing well enough for identication of emergent leaders (ELs) in small group meetings. Starting from these premises, in this study, we propose an eective method that uses 2D body pose based nonverbal features to represent the visual activity of a person. Our results suggest that, i) over- all, the proposed nonverbal features derived from body pose perform better than existing visual activity based features, ii) it is possible to improve classication results by applying unsupervised feature learning as a preprocessing step, and iii) the proposed nonverbal features are able to advance the EL identication performances of other types of nonverbal features when they are used together.