Occlusion Robust Cognitive Engagement Detection in Real-World Classroom

Abstract

Cognitive engagement involves mental and physical involvement, with observable behaviors as indicators. Automatically measuring cognitive engagement can offer valuable insights for instructors. However, object occlusion, inter-class similarity, and intra-class variance make designing an effective detection method challenging. To deal with these problems, we propose the Object-Enhanced–You Only Look Once version 8 nano (OE-YOLOv8n) model. This model employs the YOLOv8n framework with an improved Inner Minimum Point Distance Intersection over Union (IMPDIoU) Loss to detect cognitive engagement. To evaluate the proposed methodology, we construct a real-world Students’ Cognitive Engagement (SCE) dataset. Extensive experiments on the self-built dataset show the superior performance of the proposed model, which improves the detection performance of the five distinct classes with a precision of 92.5%.