Touch Recognition with Attentive End-to-End Model

Touch is the earliest sense to develop and the first mean of contact with the external world. Touch also plays a key role in our socio-emotional communication: we use it to communicate our feelings, elicit strong emotions in others and modulate behavior (e.g compliance). Although its relevance, touch is an understudied modality in Human-Machine-Interaction compared to audition and vision. Most of the social touch recognition systems require a feature engineering step making them difficult to compare and to generalize to other databases. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach. We present an attention-based end-to-end model for touch gesture recognition evaluated on two public datasets (CoST and HAART) in the context of the ICMI 15 Social Touch Challenge. Our model gave a similar level of accuracy: 61% for CoST and 68% for HAART and uses self-attention as an alternative to feature engineering and Recurrent Neural Networks.