Interpersonal relation recognition: a survey

People spend a considerable amount of their time in social activities, where person-to-person relations are of main relevance. Recently, there has been an increasing research interest in automatically analyzing interpersonal relations, for the social and behavioral implications, and the many practical applications it may have. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not a systematic study providing a harmonized view of the literature in the field. On this ground, we summarize in our work interpersonal relation recognition datasets and methods aiming to help researchers to have a better understanding of the characteristics of the state-of-the-art. In the proposed study, we distinguish between methods that address objective relations that do not depend on behavior or emotional state, and methods that consider subjective ones that depend on emotions. It turns out quite evidently that aiming at the latter recognition task is more challenging, with the existing methods that provide convincing results only on limited and very specific cases. For both the broad categories, we discuss datasets and methods according to the different behavioural and psychological models used to annotate and classify the data. We conclude our review work, by providing a comprehensive discussion pointing out current limitations and future research perspectives.