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.