Computer analysis of TV spots: the semiotics perspective

Commercial videos exploit simultaneously several planes of expression (colors, editing effects, viewpoints and rhythms, etc.) to encode the message being vehiculated to the audience in the most persuasive way. In this paper, previous research in the marketing and semiotics fields is translated into a multimedia engineering perspective by formalizing a set of rules mapping visual features at the perceptual level onto higher level features capturing the main narrative structures of the spot. The rules are embedded in a video retrieval system supporting access to a database of commercials based either on semiotic video categories or on global similarity with respect to a template spot.