Corpus Development for Affective Video Indexing

Affective video indexing is the area of research that develops techniques to automatically generate descriptions that encode the emotional reactions which videos evoke in viewers. This paper provides a set of corpus development specifications based on state-of-the-art practice intended to support researchers in this field. Affective descriptions can be used for video search and browsing systems offering users affective perspectives. The paper is motivated by the observation that affective video indexing has yet to fully profit from the standard corpora (data sets) that have benefited conventional forms of video indexing. Affective video indexing faces unique challenges, since viewer-reported affective reactions are difficult to collect, and collection efforts must be carefully designed in order to both cover the full scope of affective response and also capture its stability. We first present background information on affect and multimedia and related work on affective multimedia indexing, including existing corpora. Three dimensions emerge as critical for affective video corpora, and form the basis for our proposed specifications: the context of viewer response, personal variation among viewers, and the effectiveness and efficiency of corpus creation. Finally, we present examples of three recent corpora and discuss how these corpora make progressive steps towards fulfilling the specifications.