Groupscope

As a microscope allows one to peer into the microscopic world, Groupscope will allow one to make observations into large group behavior. Currently studies involving large group behavior, where groups are made of many people over one or more locations, are done manually through observation, surveys, and event coding if video data is collected. The Groupscope project will utilize work in the field of Computer Vision and Audio Recognition to create a framework of tools that will automate the more tedious portions of these investigations, such as the tracking of individuals and their interactions, and attempt to provide an objective means by which to classify observed behavior in these studies. Utilizing NCSA Medici, a content aware analogue to the popular Dropbox, custom extraction services will obtain the needed information from collections of multi-vantage point video recordings, audio recordings, images, and spoken dialogue annotations. From this extracted metadata novel visualizations will be developed so as to allow communication researchers to easily track observed individuals and their interactions over large spans in space and time.