  Detection of groups of interacting people is a very interesting and useful
task in many modern technologies, with application fields spanning from
video-surveillance to social robotics. In this paper we first furnish a
rigorous definition of group considering the background of the social sciences:
this allows us to specify many kinds of group, so far neglected in the Computer
Vision literature. On top of this taxonomy, we present a detailed state of the
art on the group detection algorithms. Then, as a main contribution, we present
a brand new method for the automatic detection of groups in still images, which
is based on a graph-cuts framework for clustering individuals; in particular we
are able to codify in a computational sense the sociological definition of
F-formation, that is very useful to encode a group having only proxemic
information: position and orientation of people. We call the proposed method
Graph-Cuts for F-formation (GCFF). We show how GCFF definitely outperforms all
the state of the art methods in terms of different accuracy measures (some of
them are brand new), demonstrating also a strong robustness to noise and
versatility in recognizing groups of various cardinality.
