68 research outputs found
Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative: Visual Context and Attention are Primary Drivers of Affect in Video Advertisements
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.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of 20th ACM International
Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Boulder, CO, US
Human Visual Perception, study and applications to understanding Images and Videos
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
The Visual Syntax of a Postcolony: Photographs in Zambia, 1930s – 1980s
This dissertation investigates how photographs and photographic practices have both shaped and have been shaped by the political, cultural and performative demands of the project of postcolonial nation building in Zambia. Drawing on both visual and textual materials from the 1930s to the 1980s, collected from the National Archives of Zambia as well as several private collections, including that of the Fine Art Studios in Lusaka, this dissertation attempts to understand the different ways in which critical attention to the role of the mechanically reproduced images can allow us to reconsider the given boundaries between the colonial and the postcolonial, the public and the private, and the nation and the individual. The first chapter explores the methodological possibilities and the archival limits of writing a social history of photography in Zambia that still remains largely undocumented. The second chapter sifts through thousands of images haphazardly stored in the National Archives of Zambia, reflecting on the shift from the ethnographic mode of observation in the late colonial period to the concerted imaging of developmentalist spectacles in the early postcolonial period. The focus of the third chapter is on the politics of official images of Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of independent Zambia. This dissertation combines uses of photographs, archival documents, semi-structured interviews and brief auto-ethnographic observations
Interactive video retrieval using implicit user feedback.
PhDIn the recent years, the rapid development of digital technologies and the low
cost of recording media have led to a great increase in the availability of
multimedia content worldwide. This availability places the demand for the
development of advanced search engines. Traditionally, manual annotation of
video was one of the usual practices to support retrieval. However, the vast
amounts of multimedia content make such practices very expensive in terms of
human effort. At the same time, the availability of low cost wearable sensors
delivers a plethora of user-machine interaction data. Therefore, there is an
important challenge of exploiting implicit user feedback (such as user navigation
patterns and eye movements) during interactive multimedia retrieval sessions
with a view to improving video search engines. In this thesis, we focus on
automatically annotating video content by exploiting aggregated implicit
feedback of past users expressed as click-through data and gaze movements.
Towards this goal, we have conducted interactive video retrieval experiments, in
order to collect click-through and eye movement data in not strictly controlled
environments. First, we generate semantic relations between the multimedia
items by proposing a graph representation of aggregated past interaction data and
exploit them to generate recommendations, as well as to improve content-based
search. Then, we investigate the role of user gaze movements in interactive video
retrieval and propose a methodology for inferring user interest by employing
support vector machines and gaze movement-based features. Finally, we propose
an automatic video annotation framework, which combines query clustering into
topics by constructing gaze movement-driven random forests and temporally
enhanced dominant sets, as well as video shot classification for predicting the
relevance of viewed items with respect to a topic. The results show that
exploiting heterogeneous implicit feedback from past users is of added value for
future users of interactive video retrieval systems
Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog
What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material
Seeing the City Digitally
This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life
Seeing the City Digitally
This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life
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