NICE Toolbox: Nonverbal Interpersonal Communication Exploration Toolbox

Abstract

Understanding human communication is a long-standing goal in psychological research. People express themselves through many verbal and nonverbal channels: posture, gesture, gaze, facial expression, and speech. Measurement and annotation of these signals has traditionally required time-consuming manual work by trained human labellers. The Nonverbal Interpersonal Communication Exploration (NICE) Toolbox is a free, open-source Python framework that automatically measures these signals by combining existing state-of-the-art computer vision and speech-processing methods into a single software package. It includes support for multi-camera systems, interchangeable detection algorithms, 2D and 3D visualization of detector outputs, evaluation on the user's custom data, and export to third-party software. With the release of this tool, we aim to make data exploration of interpersonal communication signals scalable, reproducible, and accessible for psychological research.