Touching the Void - Introducing CoST: Corpus of Social Touch

Merel M. Jung, Ronald Poppe, Mannes Poel, Dirk K. J. Heylen

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

    Abstract

    Touch behavior is of great importance during social interaction. To transfer the tactile modality from interpersonal interaction to other areas such as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and remote communication automatic recognition of social touch is necessary. This paper introduces CoST: Corpus of Social Touch, a collection containing 7805 instances of 14 different social touch gestures. The gestures were performed in three variations: gentle, normal and rough, on a sensor grid wrapped around a mannequin arm. Recognition of the rough variations of these 14 gesture classes using Bayesian classifiers and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) resulted in an overall accuracy of 54% and 53%, respectively. Furthermore, this paper provides more insight into the challenges of automatic recognition of social touch gestures, including which gestures can be recognized more easily and which are more difficult to recognize.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
    Pages120-127
    ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-2885-2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

    Keywords

    • Haptic device
    • Touch
    • Social touch
    • Gesture recognition
    • Touch corpus

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