Electrodermal activity applied to violent scenes impact measurement and user profiling

Identifying violent scenes in a movie may be of high interest as soon as the associated content has to be shown to a specific audience, as children for instance. However, defining what a violent scene is as well as extracting the violent excerpts from the only audiovisual cue are two hard tasks. In this article, we propose a pilot study to evaluate the interest of an approach based on the use of the electrodermal activity (EDA) to address these problems in an objective and human-centered manner. Assuming a consumer context, we especially focus on the use of a commercial sensor to capture the EDA. A comparison with a more professional device is initially performed to validate the accuracy of the commercial sensor. Two main aspects of the violent scene impact measurement with the EDA are then discussed. To tackle the violent scene detection problem, a methodology to correlate the EDA information with manual annotations of violent excerpts is first proposed. The user sensitivity to violence is then addressed and an approach to identify different profiles in the audience is qualitatively proposed. The advantages and limitations of such an approach are discussed and potential improvements are finally proposed.