Analyzing human–human interactions: A survey

Many videos depict people, and it is their interactions that inform us of their activities, relation to one another and the cultural and social setting. With advances in human action recognition, researchers have begun to address the automated recognition of these human–human interactions from video. The main challenges stem from dealing with the considerable variation in recording setting, the appearance of the people depicted and the coordinated performance of their interaction. This survey provides a summary of these challenges and datasets to address these, followed by an in-depth discussion of relevant vision-based recognition and detection methods. We focus on recent, promising work based on deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Finally, we outline directions to overcome the limitations of the current state-of-the-art to analyze and, eventually, understand social human actions. •Comprehensive survey of vision-based human–human interaction recognition literature.•Focus on recent CNN-based human–human interaction recognition algorithms.•Summary of current challenges and relevant datasets.•Outline of research directions to overcome the limitations of the state-of-the-art.