Title: Multichannel Attention Network for Analyzing Visual Behavior in Public Speaking,
Abstract: Public speaking is an important aspect of human communication and
interaction. The majority of computational work on public speaking concentrates
on analyzing the spoken content, and the verbal behavior of the speakers. While
the success of public speaking largely depends on the content of the talk, and
the verbal behavior, non-verbal (visual) cues, such as gestures and physical
appearance also play a significant role. This paper investigates the importance
of visual cues by estimating their contribution towards predicting the
popularity of a public lecture. For this purpose, we constructed a large
database of more than $1800$ TED talk videos. As a measure of popularity of the
TED talks, we leverage the corresponding (online) viewers' ratings from
YouTube. Visual cues related to facial and physical appearance, facial
expressions, and pose variations are extracted from the video frames using
convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Thereafter, an attention-based long
short-term memory (LSTM) network is proposed to predict the video popularity
from the sequence of visual features. The proposed network achieves
state-of-the-art prediction accuracy indicating that visual cues alone contain
highly predictive information about the popularity of a talk. Furthermore, our
network learns a human-like attention mechanism, which is particularly useful
for interpretability, i.e. how attention varies with time, and across different
visual cues by indicating their relative importance.