ChaLearn LAP Large-scale Isolated Gesture Recognition Challenge (Round 2)

Evaluation Criteria

Submission format

In this track, the participants should submit a ZIP file containing only one text file named exactly as required below (do not add any folder in the ZIP). The ZIP file can be named randomly. Each line should contain three columns: name of M video, name of K video and the predicted label of that gesture video. The first two columns should be the same as the list file provieded with the database, and the third column is your prediction.

Note that: In the contest, you can use RGB, depth or RGB-D data as you want.

You can check this example out.

For Phase 1, the name of the prediction text file should be valid_prediction.txt .

For Phase 2, the final test phase, you could only submit your prediction once, and the name of the text file should be test_prediction.txt .

For example:

    ...
    valid/001/M_00001.avi valid/001/K_00001.avi 246
    valid/001/M_00002.avi valid/001/K_00002.avi 208
    valid/001/M_00003.avi valid/001/K_00003.avi 155
    valid/001/M_00004.avi valid/001/K_00004.avi 138
    valid/001/M_00005.avi valid/001/K_00005.avi 91
    ...

CHALEARN Contest Rules for

 ICCV 2017 Workshop on Action, Gesture, and Emotion Recognition Workshop and Competitions: Large Scale Multimodal Gesture Recognition and Real versus Fake expressed emotions

Official rules

 Common terms used in these rules:

These are the official rules that govern how the Action, Gesture, and Emotion Recognition Workshop and Competitions: Large Scale Multimodal Gesture Recognition and Real versus Fake expressed emotions promotion will operate. This promotion will be simply referred to as the “contest” or the “challenge” throughout the rest of these rules and may be abbreviated on our website, in our documentation, and other publications as ChaLearn LAP.

In these rules, “organizers”, “we,” “our,” and “us” refer to CHALEARN and MS refer to Microsoft; "participant”, “you,” and “yourself” refer to an eligible contest participant.  

SECTION 1                 Contest description

This is a skill-based contest and chance plays no part in the determination of the winner(s). The contest consists of four tracks:

(a) Isolated Gesture recognition from RGB-D data track. The track focuses on isolated gesture recognition from RGB-D data, where the goal is developing methods for recognizing the category of human gestures from segmented RGB-D video. A new data set called ChaLearn LAP RGB-D Isolated Gesture Dataset (IsoGD) is considered for this track (sample images taken from this data set are shown in Figure 2).  This database includes 47,933 RGB-D gesture videos (about 9GB). Each RGB-D video depicts a single gesture and there are 249 gesture categories performed by 21 different individuals. Performance of methods will be judged by its recognition performance.

(b) Continuous gesture recognition from RGB-D data track. This is a complimentary track to track 2, and it focuses on continuous gesture recognition from RGB-D data. The goal in this track is to develop methods that can perform simultaneous segmentation and recognition of gesture categories from continuous RGB-D video. The newly created:  ChaLearn LAP RGB-D Continuous Gesture Dataset (ConGD) is considered for this track (sample images taken from this data set are shown in Figure 2).  The data set comprises a total of 47,933 gestures in 22535 RGB-D continuous videos (about 4GB). Each RGB-D video depicts one or more gestures and there are 249 gesture categories performed by 21 different individuals. Performance of methods will be judged by its Jaccard index.

(c) Fake vs. true emotion recognition challenge track.   Being able to recognize deceit and the authenticity of emotional displays is notoriously difficult for human observers because of the subtlety or short duration of discriminative facial responses. Applications are numerous, from determining deceiving behavior in police investigations, to improving border control by understanding the incongruity between what is expressed and what is experienced. For this challenge a new database, the SASE-FE database, consist of 643 different videos which have been recorded with a high resolution GoPro-Hero camera, has been prepared and labelled. The challenges are recogntion of fakeness vs trueness of emotion and recognition of fakeness vs truness within a specific emotion, e.g. fake vs true surprise.

For all the three tracks, eligible entries received will be judged using the criteria described above to determine winners.

SECTION 2                 Tentative Contest Schedule

The registered participants will be notified by email of any change in the schedule.

20th April, 2017: Beginning of the quantitative competition, release of development and validation data.
21th June, 2017: Release of encrypted final evaluation data (for emotion challenge). Participants can start training their methods with the whole data set.
22th June, 2017: Deadline for code submission.
23th June, 2017: Release of final evaluation data decryption key (for emotion challenge). Participants start predicting the results on the final evaluation data.
2nd July, 2017: End of the quantitative competition. Deadline for submitting the predictions on the final evaluation data. Code verification phase. 
6th July, 2017: Deadline for submitting fact sheets.
23rd July, 2017: Release of the verification results to the participants for review. Participants are invited to follow the paper submission guide for submitting contest papers.
10th August, 2017: Paper submission deadline for submitting their ICCVW paper (following workshop dates)
20th August, 2017: Notification of paper acceptance.
25th August, 2017: Camera ready submission.
October 2017: Workshop @ICCV 2017, challenge results, award ceremony.

  SECTION 3                 Eligibility

 You are eligible to enter this contest if you meet the following requirements:

 (a)   You are an individual or a team of people desiring to contribute to the tasks of the challenge and accepting to follow its rules; and You are NOT a resident of any country constrained by US export regulations included in the OFAC sanction page http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx. Therefore residents of these countries / regions are not eligible to participate; and You are not an employee of CHALEARN or any of the sponsoring or co-organizing entities, including Microsoft; and

 (b)  You are not involved in any part of the administration and execution of this contest; and

 (c)  You are not an immediate family (parent, sibling, spouse, or child) or household member of an employee of CHALEARN, Microsoft, or a person involved in any part of the administration and execution of this contest.

This contest is void within the geographic area identified above and wherever else prohibited by law.

If you choose to submit an entry, but are not qualified to enter the contest, this entry is voluntary, and any entry you submit is governed by the remainder of these contest rules; CHALEARN reserves the right to evaluate it for scientific purposes. If you are not qualified to submit a contest entry and still choose to submit one, under no circumstances will such entries qualify for sponsored prizes.

SECTION 4                 Entry

To be eligible for judging, an entry must meet the following content/technical requirements:  

(a)         Entry contents: The participants are required to submit prediction results and code. To be eligible for prizes, the top ranking participants are required to publicly release their code under a license of their choice, taken among popular OSI-approved licenses (http://opensource.org/licenses) and make their code accessible on-line for a period of not less than three years following the end of the challenge (only required for top three ranked participants of each competition track). To be part of the final ranking the participants will be asked to fill out a survey (fact sheet) briefly describing their method. The top ranking participants and the rest of participants are also invited (not mandatory) to submit a maximum 8-page paper for the proceedings of the ICCV 2017 Workshop on Action and Gesture Recognition Workshop and Large Scale Multimodal Gesture Recognition Competition. To be eligible for prizes, the top ranked participants' score must improve the baseline performance provided by the challenge organizers.

(b)         Pre-requisite: There is no pre-requisite to participate, including no requirement to have participated in previous challenges.

(c)          Use of data provided: All data provided by CHALEARN are freely available to the participants from the website of the challenge under license terms provided with the data. The data are available only for open research and educational purposes, within the scope of the challenge. ChaLearn and the organizers make no warranties regarding the database, including but not limited to warranties of non-infringement or fitness for a particular purpose. The copyright of the images remain the property of their respective owners. By downloading and making use of the data, you accept full responsibility for using the data. You shall defend and indemnify ChaLearn and the organizers, including their employees, Trustees, officers and agents, against any and all claims arising from your use of the data. You agree not to redistribute the data without this notice.

(1)                Test data:

The organizers will use test data to perform the final evaluation, hence the participants’ final entry will be based on test data.

(2)                Training and validation data:

The contest organizers will make available to the participants a training dataset with truth values, and a validation set with no truth values. The validation data will be used by the participants for practice purposes to validate their systems. It will be similar in composition to the test set (validation labels will be provided in the final test stage of the challenge).

(3)                Post-challenge analyses:

The organizers may also perform additional post-challenge analyses using extra data, but the results will not affect the ranking of the challenge performed with the test data.

(d)       Submission: The entries of the participants will be submitted on-line via the Codalab web platform. During the development period, the participants will receive immediate feed-back on validation data released for practice purpose. For the final evaluation, the results will be computed automatically on test data submissions.  The performances on test data will not be released until the challenge is over.

(e)         Original work, permissions: In addition, by submitting your entry into this contest you confirm that, to the best of your knowledge: 

(1)                Your entry is your own original work; and

(2)         Your entry only includes material that you own, or that you have permission from the copyright / trademark owner to use.

(f)           Minimum performance: Your entry must overperform the baseline entry provided by the organizers.

SECTION 5                 Potential use of entry

Other than what is set forth below, we are not claiming any ownership rights to your entry. However, by submitting your entry, you:

(a)                Are granting us an irrevocable, worldwide right and license, in exchange for your opportunity to participate in the contest and potential prize awards, for the duration of the protection of the copyrights to:

(1)                Use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze results submitted or produced by your code and other material submitted by you in connection with this contest and any future research or contests sponsored by CHALEARN and Microsoft; and

(2)                Feature your entry and all its content in connection with the promotion of this contest in all media (now known or later developed);

(b)               Agree to sign any necessary documentation that may be required for us and our designees to make use of the rights you granted above;

(c)                Understand and acknowledge that Microsoft and other entrants may have developed or commissioned materials similar or identical to your submission and you waive any claims you may have resulting from any similarities to your entry;

(d)               Understand that we cannot control the incoming information you will disclose to our representatives or our co-sponsor’s representatives in the course of entering, or what our representatives will remember about your entry. You also understand that we will not restrict work assignments of representatives or our co-sponsor’s representatives who have had access to your entry. By entering this contest, you agree that use of information in our representatives’ or our co-sponsor’s  representatives unaided memories in the development or deployment of our products or services does not create liability for us under this agreement or copyright or trade secret law;

(e)               Understand that you will not receive any compensation or credit for use of your entry, other than what is described in these official rules.

If you do not want to grant us these rights to your entry, please do not enter this contest.

SECTION 6                  Submission of entries

(a)                Follow the instructions on the Codalab website to submit entries.

(b)           The participants will be registered as mutually exclusive teams. Each team may submit only one single final entry. We are not responsible for entries that we do not receive for any reason, or for entries that we receive but are not functioning properly.

(c)       The participants must follow the instructions. We will automatically disqualify incomplete or invalid entries.

SECTION 7                 Judging the entries

The board of CHALEARN will select a panel of judges to judge the entries; all judges will be forbidden to enter the contest and will be experts in computer vision, statistics, machine learning, or a related field, or experts in challenge organization.  A list of the judges will be made available upon request. The judges will review all eligible entries received and select three winners for each of the three competition tracks based upon the prediction score on test data. The judges will verify that the winners complied with the rules, including that they documented their method by filling out a fact sheet.

The decisions of these judges are final and binding. The distribution of prizes according to the decisions made by the judges will be made within three (3) months after completion of the last round of the contest. If we do not receive a sufficient number of entries meeting the entry requirements, we may, at our discretion based on the above criteria, not award any or all of the contest prizes below.  In the event of a tie between any eligible entries, the tie will be broken by giving preference to the earliest submission, using the time stamp of the submission platform.

SECTION 8                 Prizes and Awards

(a)      Microsoft, ChaLearn, University of Barcelona, Université Paris Saclay, Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis Group, INAOE, are the financial sponsors of this contest. There will be travel grants for the winners (based on availability) to boost contest participation; these awards will not require participants to enter into an IP agreement with any of the sponsors, to disclose algorithms, or to deliver source code to them.

(a)                Travel awards:

Travel awards and free registrations will be distributed to top ranked participants of each track based upon need and availability.

(b)        If for any reason the advertised prize is unavailable, unless to do so would be prohibited by law, we reserve the right to substitute a prize(s) of equal or greater value, as permitted. We will only award one prize per team within each competition track, but the team can obtain prizes from different tracks.  If you are selected as a potential winner of this contest:

(1)                If your prize is not in cash, you may not exchange your prize for cash; you may not exchange any prize for other merchandise or services.

(2)                You may not designate someone else as the winner. If you are unable or unwilling to accept your prize, we will award it to an alternate potential winner.

(3)                If you accept a prize, you will be solely responsible for all applicable taxes related to accepting the prize.

(4)                If you are a minor in your place of residence, we may award the prize to your parent/legal guardian on your behalf and your parent/legal guardian will be designated as the winner.

SECTION 9                 Other Sponsored Events

(1)                To stimulate participation, the organizers are making available several channels of scientific paper publication. Publishing papers is optional and will not be a condition to entering the challenge or winning prizes.

(2)                The results of the challenge will be published in the ICCV 2017 Workshop. The collection of papers could also be printed as a book in the Challenges in Machine Learning series of Microtome (http://www.mtome.com/Publications/CiML/ciml.html).

(3)                Best conference papers related to the participants' methods of the four tracks can  be invited to be extended and submitted to the Special Issue on Personality Analysis in the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (http://gesture.chalearn.org/2016-looking-at-people-eccv-workshop-challenge/si-tac), please note that only papers within the scope of the special issue will be considered.  

The organizers may also sponsor other events to stimulate participation.

SECTION 10             Notifications

If there is any change to data, schedule, instructions of participation, or these rules, the registered participants will be notified at the email they provided with the registration.

If you are a potential winner, we will notify you by sending a message to the e-mail address listed on your final entry within seven days following the determination of winners. If the notification that we send is returned as undeliverable, or you are otherwise unreachable for any reason, we may award the prize to an alternate winner, unless forbidden by applicable law.

Winners who have entered the contest as a team will be responsible to share any prize among their members. The prize will be delivered to the registered team leader. If this person becomes unavailable for any reason, the prize will be delivered to be the authorized account holder of the e-mail address used to make the winning entry.

If you are a potential winner, we may require you to sign a declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release and applicable tax forms. If you are a potential winner and are a minor in your place of residence, and we require that your parent or legal guardian will be designated as the winner, and we may require that they sign a declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release on your behalf. If you, (or your parent/legal guardian if applicable), do not sign and return these required forms within the time period listed on the winner notification message, we may disqualify you (or the designated parent/legal guardian) and select an alternate selected winner.

SECTION 11             On-line notification

We will post changes in the rules or changes in the data as well as the names of confirmed winners (after contest decisions are made by the judges) online on http://gesture.chalearn.org/. This list will remain posted for one year or will be made available upon request by sending email to mmgesture@chalearn.org.

SECTION 12             Conditions. By entering this contest you agree:

(a)          To abide by these official rules;

(b)         To the extent allowable under applicable law, to release and hold harmless CHALEARN and sponsors, their respective parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, employees and agents from any and all liability or any injury, loss, damage, right, claim or action of any kind arising from or in connection with this contest or any prize won save for residents of the United Kingdom, Chile, Korea, Greece, Brazil, Turkey, Hong Kong, France and Germany with respect to claims resulting from death or personal injury arising from CHALEARN’s and Microsoft and University of Barcelona’s negligence, for residents of the United Kingdom with respect to claims resulting from the tort of deceit or any other liabilities that may not be excluded by law, and for residents of Australia in respect of any implied condition or warranty the exclusion of which from these official rules would contravene any statute or cause any part of these official rules to be void;

(c)          That CHALEARN’s decisions will be final and binding on all matters related to this contest; and

(d)       That by accepting a prize, CHALEARN and competition sponsors may use your team name, your name, and your place of residence online and in print, or in any other media, in connection with this contest, without payment or compensation to you. The declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release provided to the potential winner will make reference to obtaining his/her free consent to use his/her name and place of residence. In any case, the lack of such consent does not prevent the winner from receiving the prize.

(e)        This contest will be governed by the laws of the state of California, and you consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the courts of the state of California for any disputes arising out of this contest. For residents of Austria only: you may withdraw your submission from this contest within seven days of your entry. If you withdraw within seven days of entry, your submission will be returned to you, and we will not make any use of your submission in the future. However, you will not be eligible to win a prize. If you do not withdraw within seven days of entry, you will be bound by the provisions of these official rules. For residents of the United Kingdom only: the provisions of the contracts (rights of third parties) act 1999 will not apply to this agreement. For residents of New Zealand only: the provisions of the contracts (privity) act of 1982 will not apply to this agreement.For Quebec residents: any litigation respecting the conduct or organization of a publicity contest may be submitted to the Régie des Alcools, des Courses et des Jeux for ruling. Any litigation respecting the awarding of a prize may be submitted to the Régie only for the purpose of helping the parties reach a settlement.  For residents of Israel only: this agreement does not entitle third parties to benefits under this agreement as defined in Chapter “D” of the Contracts Act (General Part) – 1973.

SECTION 13             Unforeseen event

If an unforeseen or unexpected event (including, but not limited to: someone cheating; a virus, bug, or catastrophic event corrupting data or the submission platform; someone discovering a flaw in the data or modalities of the challenge) that cannot be reasonably anticipated or controlled, (also referred to as force majeure)affects the fairness and / or integrity of this contest, we reserve the right to cancel, change or suspend this contest. This right is reserved whether the event is due to human or technical error. If a solution cannot be found to restore the integrity of the contest, we reserve the right to select winners based on the criteria specified above from among all eligible entries received before we had to cancel, change or suspend the contest subject to obtaining the approval from the Régie des Alcools, des Courses et des Jeux with respect to the province of Quebec.

Computer “hacking” is unlawful. If you attempt to compromise the integrity or the legitimate operation of this contest by hacking or by cheating or committing fraud in any way, we may seek damages from you to the fullest extent permitted by law. Further, we may ban you from participating in any of our future contests, so please play fairly.

SECTION 14             Sponsor

ChaLearn is the sponsor of this contest.
 955 Creston Road
Berkeley, CA 94708, USA
events@chalearn.org

and

Microsoft, University of Barcelona, Université Paris Saclay, Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis group, and INAOE, are the co-sponsors of this contest. Additional sponsors can be added during the competition period.

Privacy

During the development phase of the contest and when they submit their final entries, contest participants do not need to disclose their real identity, but must provide a valid email address where we can be deliver notifications to them regarding the contest. To be eligible for prizes, however, contest participants will need to disclose their real identity to contest organizers, informing them by email of their name, professional affiliation, and address. To enter the contest, the participants will need to become users of the Codalab platform. Any profile information stored on this platform can be viewed and edited by the users. After the contest, the participants may cancel their account with the Codalab and cease to be users of that platform. All personal information will then be destroyed. The Codalab privacy policy will apply to contest information submitted by participants on the Codalab. Otherwise, CHALEARN’s privacy policy will apply to this contest and to all information that we receive from your entry that we receive directly from you or which you have submitted as part of your contest entry on the Codalab. Please read the privacy policy on the contest entry page before accepting the official rules and submitting your entry. Please note that by accepting the official rules you are also accepting the terms of the CHALEARN privacy policy: http://www.chalearn.org/privacy.html.