Emotion evoked by an advertisement plays a key role in influencing brand recall and eventual consumer choices. Automatic ad affect recognition has several useful applications. However, the use of content-based feature representations does not give insights into how affect is modulated by aspects such as the ad scene setting, salient object attributes and their interactions. Neither do such approaches inform us on how humans prioritize visual information for ad understanding. Our work addresses these lacunae by decomposing video content into detected objects, coarse scene structure, object statistics and actively attended objects identified via eye-gaze. We measure the importance of each of these information channels by systematically incorporating related information into ad affect prediction models. Contrary to the popular notion that ad affect hinges on the narrative and the clever use of linguistic and social cues, we find that actively attended objects and the coarse scene structure better encode affective information as compared to individual scene objects or conspicuous background elements.
The success of deep learning in computer vision has greatly increased the need for annotated image datasets. We propose an EEG (Electroencephalogram)-based image annotation system. While humans can recognize objects in 20-200 milliseconds, the need to manually label images results in a low annotation throughput. Our system employs brain signals captured via a consumer EEG device to achieve an annotation rate of up to 10 images per second. We exploit the P300 event-related potential (ERP) signature to identify target images during a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. We further perform unsupervised outlier removal to achieve an F1-score of 0.88 on the test set. The proposed system does not depend on category-specific EEG signatures enabling the annotation of any new image category without any model pre-training. There is an increasing amount of multimedia content available to end users. Recommender systems help these end users by selecting a small but relevant subset of items for each user based on her his preferences. This paper investigates the influence of affective metadata (metadata that describe the user's emotions) on the performance of a content-based recommender (CBR) system for images. The underlying assumption is that affective parameters are more closely related to the user's experience than generic metadata (e.g. genre) and are thus more suitable for separating the relevant items from the non-relevant. We propose a novel affective modeling approach based on users' emotive responses. We performed a user-interaction session and compared the performance of the recommender system with affective versus generic metadata. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the proposed affective parameters yield a significant improvement in the performance of the recommender system. Despite the fact that advertisements (ads) often include strongly emotional content, very little work has been devoted to affect recognition (AR) from ads. This work explicitly compares content-centric and user-centric ad AR methodologies, and evaluates the impact of enhanced AR on computational advertising via a user study. Specifically, we (1) compile an affective ad dataset capable of evoking coherent emotions across users; (2) explore the efficacy of content-centric convolutional neural network (CNN) features for encoding emotions, and show that CNN features outperform low-level emotion descriptors; (3) examine user-centered ad AR by analyzing Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses acquired from eleven viewers, and find that EEG signals encode emotional information better than content descriptors; (4) investigate the relationship between objective AR and subjective viewer experience while watching an ad-embedded online video stream based on a study involving 12 users. To our knowledge, this is the first work to (a) expressly compare user vs content-centered AR for ads, and (b) study the relationship between modeling of ad emotions and its impact on a real-life advertising application. We propose a novel framework to localize and label affective objects and actions in images through a combination of text, visual and gaze-based analysis. Human gaze provides useful cues to infer locations and interactions of affective objects. While concepts (labels) associated with an image can be determined from its caption, we demonstrate localization of these concepts upon learning from a statistical affect model for world concepts. The affect model is derived from non-invasively acquired fixation patterns on labeled images, and guides localization of affective objects (faces, reptiles) and actions (look, read) from fixations in unlabeled images. Experimental results obtained on a database of 500 images confirm the effectiveness and promise of the proposed approach. In this work, we aim to find neuro-physiological indicators to validate tags attached to video content. Subjects are shown a video and a tag and we aim to determine whether the shown tag was congruent with the presented video by detecting the occurrence of an N400 event-related potential. Tag validation could be used in conjunction with a vision-based recognition system as a feedback mechanism to improve the classification accuracy for multimedia indexing and retrieval. An advantage of using the EEG modality for tag validation is that it is a way of performing implicit tagging. This means it can be performed while the user is passively watching the video. Independent Component Analysis and repeated measures ANOVA are used for analysis. Our experimental results show a clear occurrence of the N400 and a significant difference in N400 activation between matching and non-matching tags. We present the Pascal animal classes Eye Tracking database. Our database comprises eye movement recordings compiled from forty users for the bird, cat, cow, dog, horse and sheep trainval sets from the VOC 2012 image set. Different from recent eye-tracking databases such as kiwon_cvpr13_gaze,PapadopoulosCKF14 , a salient aspect of PET is that it contains eye movements recorded for both the free-viewing and visual search task conditions. While some differences in terms of overall gaze behavior and scanning patterns are observed between the two conditions, a very similar number of fixations are observed on target objects for both conditions. As a utility application, we show how feature pooling around fixated locations enables enhanced (animal) object classification accuracy. We present a novel framework for recognizing personality traits based on users' physiological responses to affective movie clips. Extending studies that have correlated explicit implicit affective user responses with Extraversion and Neuroticism traits, we perform single-trial recognition of the big-five traits from Electrocardiogram (ECG), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Electroencephalogram (EEG) and facial emotional responses compiled from 36 users using off-the-shelf sensors. Firstly, we examine relationships among personality scales and (explicit) affective user ratings acquired in the context of prior observations. Secondly, we isolate physiological correlates of personality traits. Finally, unimodal and multimodal personality recognition results are presented. Personality differences are better revealed while analyzing responses to emotionally homogeneous (e.g., high valence, high arousal) clips, and significantly above-chance recognition is achieved for all five traits. This paper presents a new multimodal database and the associated results for characterization of affect (valence, arousal and dominance) using the Magneto encephalogram (MEG) brain signals and peripheral physiological signals (horizontal EOG, ECG, trapezius EMG). We attempt single-trial classification of affect in movie and music video clips employing emotional responses extracted from eighteen participants. The main findings of this study are that: (i) the MEG signal effectively encodes affective viewer responses, (ii) clip arousal is better predicted by MEG, while peripheral physiological signals are more effective for predicting valence and (iii) prediction performance is better for movie clips as compared to music video clips. Tagging is the annotation of multimedia data with userspecified keywords known as tags, with the aim of facilitating fast and accurate data retrieval based on these tags. In contrast to this process, also referred to as explicit tagging, implicit human-centered tagging (IHCT) refers to exploiting the information on user's nonverbal reactions (e.g., facial expressions like smiles or head gestures like shakes) to multimedia data, with which he or she interacts, to assign new or improve the existing tags associated with the target data. Thus, implicit tagging allows that a data item gets tagged each time a user interacts with it based on the reactions of the user to the data (e.g., laughter when seeing a funny video), in contrast to explicit tagging paradigm in which a data item gets tagged only if a user is requested (or chooses) to associate tags with it. As nonverbal reactions to observed multimedia are displayed naturally and spontaneously, no purposeful explicit action (effort) is required from the user; hence, the resulting tagging process is said to be "implicit" and "human centered" (in contrast to being dictated by computer and being "computer-centered"). This paper presents a user-independent emotion recognition method with the goal of recovering affective tags for videos using electroencephalogram (EEG), pupillary response and gaze distance. We first selected 20 video clips with extrinsic emotional content from movies and online resources. Then, EEG responses and eye gaze data were recorded from 24 participants while watching emotional video clips. Ground truth was defined based on the median arousal and valence scores given to clips in a preliminary study using an online questionnaire. Based on the participants' responses, three classes for each dimension were defined. The arousal classes were calm, medium aroused, and activated and the valence classes were unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant. One of the three affective labels of either valence or arousal was determined by classification of bodily responses. A one-participant-out cross validation was employed to investigate the classification performance in a user-independent approach. The best classification accuracies of 68.5 percent for three labels of valence and 76.4 percent for three labels of arousal were obtained using a modality fusion strategy and a support vector machine. The results over a population of 24 participants demonstrate that user-independent emotion recognition can outperform individual self-reports for arousal assessments and do not underperform for valence assessments. MAHNOB-HCI is a multimodal database recorded in response to affective stimuli with the goal of emotion recognition and implicit tagging research. A multimodal setup was arranged for synchronized recording of face videos, audio signals, eye gaze data, and peripheral central nervous system physiological signals. Twenty-seven participants from both genders and different cultural backgrounds participated in two experiments. In the first experiment, they watched 20 emotional videos and self-reported their felt emotions using arousal, valence, dominance, and predictability as well as emotional keywords. In the second experiment, short videos and images were shown once without any tag and then with correct or incorrect tags. Agreement or disagreement with the displayed tags was assessed by the participants. The recorded videos and bodily responses were segmented and stored in a database. The database is made available to the academic community via a web-based system. The collected data were analyzed and single modality and modality fusion results for both emotion recognition and implicit tagging experiments are reported. These results show the potential uses of the recorded modalities and the significance of the emotion elicitation protocol.