Proxemics is the study of how people interact. We present a computational formulation of
visual proxemics by attempting to label each pair of people in an image with a subset of
physically based “touch codes.” A baseline approach would be to first perform pose
estimation and then detect the touch codes based on the estimated joint locations. We found
that this sequential approach does not perform well because pose estimation step is too
unreliable for images of interacting people, due to difficulties with occlusion and limb …

Introduction (a) Hand-hand (b) Shoulder-shoulder (c) Hand-shoulder (d) Hand-elbow (e)
Elbow-shoulder (f) Hand-torso (g)(h)(i)(j) Proxemics [1] is the study of how people interact.
We present a computational approach of visual proxemics by labeling each pair of people
with a set of touch codes, defined as the pairs of body parts (each element of the pair comes
from a different person) that are in physical contact.•(a)-(f) Six specific touch codes that we
study in this paper.•(g)-(j) Illustration of wide variation in appearance for hand-hand …