Figure 1: Intimacy or hostility? Head pose, along with body pose and facial expressions, is a rich source of information for interpreting human interactions. Being able to automatically understand the non-verbal cues provided by the relative head orientations of people in a scene enables a new level of human-centric video understanding. Green and red/orange heads represent LAEO and non-LAEO cases, respectively. Video source of second row: https://youtu.be/B3eFZMvNS1UAbstract Capturing the 'mutual gaze' of people is essential for understanding and interpreting the social interactions between them. To this end, this paper addresses the problem of detecting people Looking At Each Other (LAEO) in video sequences. For this purpose, we propose LAEO-Net, a new deep CNN for determining LAEO in videos. In contrast to previous works, LAEO-Net takes spatio-temporal tracks as input and reasons about the whole track. It consists of three branches, one for each character's tracked head and one for their relative position. Moreover, we introduce two new LAEO datasets: UCO-LAEO and AVA-LAEO. A thorough experimental evaluation demonstrates the ability of LAEO-Net to successfully determine if two people are LAEO and the temporal window where it happens. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the existing TVHID-LAEO video dataset, significantly outperforming previous approaches. Finally, we apply LAEO-Net to social network analysis, where we automatically infer the social relationship between pairs of people based on the frequency and duration that they LAEO.

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