Measuring Student Behavioral Engagement using Histogram of Actions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to measure student engagement by recognizing actions through skeleton modeling, using a 3D-CNN for action recognition, and classifying engagement levels with an SVM, validated on a custom dataset.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework combining skeleton-based action recognition with histogram encoding and SVM classification to assess student engagement.

Findings

Action recognition accuracy of 83.63%

Effective classification of engagement levels

Framework captures class engagement average

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for measuring behavioral engagement through students' actions recognition. The proposed approach recognizes student actions then predicts the student behavioral engagement level. For student action recognition, we use human skeletons to model student postures and upper body movements. To learn the dynamics of student upper body, a 3D-CNN model is used. The trained 3D-CNN model is used to recognize actions within every 2minute video segment then these actions are used to build a histogram of actions which encodes the student actions and their frequencies. This histogram is utilized as an input to SVM classifier to classify whether the student is engaged or disengaged. To evaluate the proposed framework, we build a dataset consisting of 1414 2-minute video segments annotated with 13 actions and 112 video segments annotated with two engagement levels. Experimental results indicate that student actions can be recognized with top 1 accuracy 83.63% and the proposed framework can capture the average engagement of the class.