Laughter Accelerometer-Based Detection in Natural Social Interactions

Investigating segmentation and inter-modality annotation strategies for wearable laughter detection

Bachelor Thesis (2025)
Author(s)

L. Knezevic Orbovic (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor(s)

H.S. Hung – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

L. Li – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

S. Tan – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Graduation Date
27-06-2025
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Project
['CSE3000 Research Project', 'Multimodal Machine Learning Techniques for Analyzing Laughter and Drinking in Spontaneous Social Encounters']
Programme
['Computer Science and Engineering']
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
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Abstract

We propose a method for detecting laughter in spontaneous social interactions using chest-worn accelerometers. Our approach compares three segmentation strategies—padded, centered, different sliding win- dowssizesandevaluatesannotationmodalities: No Audio, Only Audio, and With Audio. Using time-domain features and Random Forests, we reach up to 0.962 macro F1-score. Longer windows and multimodal annotations improve performance and generalizability. Key features include axis-wise means, deriva- tives, and inter-axis correlations. These results support the potential of motion-based laughter detection in privacy-sensitive environments, while highlighting the importance of segment and label design.

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