Affective Characterization of Movie Scenes Based on Multimedia Content Analysis and User´s Physiological Emotional Responses

In this paper, we propose an approach for affective representation of movie scenes based on the emotions that are actually felt by spectators. Such a representation can be used for characterizing the emotional content of video clips for e.g. affective video indexing and retrieval, neuromarketing studies, etc. A dataset of 64 different scenes from eight movies was shown to eight participants. While watching these clips, their physiological responses were recorded. The participants were also asked to self-assess their felt emotional arousal and valence for each scene. In addition, content-based audio- and video-based features were extracted from the movie scenes in order to characterize each one. Degrees of arousal and valence were estimated by a linear combination of features from physiological signals, as well as by a linear combination of content-based features. We showed that a significant correlation exists between arousal/valence provided by the spectator´s self-assessments, and affective grades obtained automatically from either physiological responses or from audio-video features. This demonstrates the ability of using multimedia features and physiological responses to predict the expected affect of the user in response to the emotional video content.