Exploiting visual saliency for assessing the impact of car commercials upon viewers

Content based video indexing and retrieval (CBVIR) is a lively area of research which focuses on automating the indexing, retrieval and management of videos. This area has a wide spectrum of promising applications where assessing the impact of audiovisual productions emerges as a particularly interesting and motivating one. In this paper we present a computational model capable to predict the impact (i.e. positive or negative) upon viewers of car advertisements videos by using a set of visual saliency descriptors. Visual saliency provides information about parts of the image perceived as most important, which are instinctively targeted by humans when looking at a picture or watching a video. For this reason we propose to exploit visual information, introducing it as a new feature which reflects high-level semantics objectively, to improve the video impact categorization results. The suggested salience descriptors are inspired by the mechanisms that underlie the attentional abilities of the human visual system and organized into seven distinct families according to different measurements over the identified salient areas in the video frames, namely population, size, location, geometry, orientation, movement and photographic composition. Proposed approach starts by computing saliency maps for all the video frames, where two different visual saliency detection frameworks have been considered and evaluated: the popular graph based visual saliency (GBVS) algorithm, and a state-of-the-art DNN-based approach.This work has been partially supported by the National Grants RTC-2016-5305-7 and TEC2014-53390-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.Publicad

Hierarchical representations for spatio-temporal visual attention: modeling and understanding

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorDentro del marco de la Inteligencia Artificial, la Visión Artificial es una disciplina científica que tiene como objetivo simular automaticamente las funciones del sistema visual humano, tratando de resolver tareas como la localización y el reconocimiento de objetos, la detección de eventos o el seguimiento de objetos....Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Luis Salgado Álvarez de Sotomayor.- Secretario: Ascensión Gallardo Antolín.- Vocal: Jenny Benois Pinea

Unconscious Awareness of a Branded Life: Consumer Disillusionment and the Cultivated Commercialization of Public Health

By unraveling the intricately powerful influences of pharmaceutical funding, this project examines ways in which product marketing infiltrates and contaminates public awareness efforts in the healthcare industry. Specifically, the following work deconstructs ways in which Merck Pharmaceuticals & Co. crafted a product endorsement through social marketing and nationwide lobbying efforts to most efficiently profit from the company’s Gardasil vaccination. Through means of textual analysis, interviews, focus groups, and eyetracking experimentation, I use Merck’s product endorsement efforts to illuminate the complex dynamics muddling direct-to-consumer marketing and social marketing campaigns. Social cognitive theory (SCT) offers a strong supportive foundation from which to dissect viewer healthcare message processing. In conjunction with the behaviorally-oriented cannons of SCT, social trust theory and contemporary marketing scholarship further highlight the complicated ties uniting public policy, corporatized health-marketing operations, audience cognitions, and consumer behavior. By piecing together the various ways in which Merck Pharmaceuticals puppeteered public understanding of HPV and cervical cancer, this work encourages greater awareness for the corporate influence and political agendas that work hand in hand in delivering meaning to American reality. Results indicate viewer awareness of brand markings in Merck’s HPV social marketing campaign limit message effectiveness and negatively influence consumer trust. As such, my grounded analysis conceptualizes “unconscious awareness” as it relates to branded health communication. Emergent findings showcase broader societal implications by unveiling patterns of conditioned ambivalence toward commercialized messaging. This project speaks to the capitalized communications contaminating consumer trust and public health, and presents an argument for regulation realignment in the healthcare industry. Given the sensitive nature of public health message processing, and in light of the findings collected throughout this work, my multi-layered analysis petitions for regulatory guidelines which separately address and more clearly define executional protocols for social awareness efforts and direct-to-consumer marketing operations

Volume XV, 1988 Speech Association of Minnesota Journal

Complete digitized volume (volume 15, 1988) of Speech Association of Minnesota Journal

Investigating the influence of musical congruity in advertising

This thesis investigates the influence of various musical congruity dimensions on consumers’ affective, cognitive, and behavioural responses to advertising. It adopts a mixed methods approach in examining the effects following various data collection techniques including focus group, survey studies, YouTube Analytics, as well as netnography. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to music and advertising, highlighting contemporary research issues in this area and underlining research objectives and questions, as well as a rationale for the research. Chapter 2 provides a critical review of the academic literature on music in advertising, focussing on congruity as the overarching concept examined in the thesis, and identifying various dimensions of musical congruity. Chapter 3 provides the justification for the research methodology and the subsequent selection of a mixed methods approach. Chapter 4 (Study 1) presents the university advertising findings obtained through focus group, surveys, as well as the brief YouTube Analytics statistical data. Findings of Study 1 investigating the effects of musical congruity in the context of university advertising reveal that pop music produced the most positive responses in terms of consumers’ perceived image of the university and their intention to enrol. Study 2 presented in Chapter 5 develops, refines, and redefines the concept of musical in/congruity and extends it to the context of advertising music in order to address the ongoing flaws in many of the existing music and advertising studies pertaining to the use of incongruent musical stimuli. Findings indicate how the deliberate crafting of musical incongruity can be used to engage and amuse consumers, proposing that resolving musical incongruity may enhance consumers’ recall, ad attitude, perception of brand image and quality, as well as their purchase intent. Chapter 6 (Study 3) involves netnographic findings highlighting the effects of in/congruity on consumers’ lived experiences of musical consumption in advertising. Findings relate to musical taste, indexical congruity, repetition congruity, and semantic congruity. The thesis concludes with Chapter 7 (Discussion) and Chapter 8 (Conclusion)

Why Does Content Desirability Impact Subjective Video Quality Ratings and What Can Be Done About It?

This study attempted to determine why users who like a product (in this case, film clips) rate the product higher in quality (in this case, video quality). In this study, film clips were located that were high or neutral in enjoyment. Experiment I determined that participants liked the enjoyable film clips more than the neutral clips. In Experiment 2, liking, affect, and content immersion were positively correlated with video quality. Additionally, liking partially mediated the relationship between affect and video quality. A halo effect was also found whereby all items assessing each film clip were rated highly due to heuristic reliance on affect. In Experiment 3, training participants on video quality moderated the relationship between affect and video quality; therefore, training was able to remove the halo effect. Training also increased participants' accuracy at rating video quality. Experiment 4 demonstrated that participants' video quality ratings could also be improved by instructing participants to focus on quality. Focusing on quality did not moderate the relationship between content immersion and video quality, as participants maintained high levels of content immersion even when focusing on video quality. All experiments demonstrated that enjoyable clips were rated higher in quality than neutral clips. Both training and focusing attention were helpful in increasing the accuracy of subjective video quality ratings; therefore, both approaches could be utilized in usability testing to improve the quality of feedback received

Gaze-Based Human-Robot Interaction by the Brunswick Model

We present a new paradigm for human-robot interaction based on social signal processing, and in particular on the Brunswick model. Originally, the Brunswick model copes with face-to-face dyadic interaction, assuming that the interactants are communicating through a continuous exchange of non verbal social signals, in addition to the spoken messages. Social signals have to be interpreted, thanks to a proper recognition phase that considers visual and audio information. The Brunswick model allows to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the interaction using statistical tools which measure how effective is the recognition phase. In this paper we cast this theory when one of the interactants is a robot; in this case, the recognition phase performed by the robot and the human have to be revised w.r.t. the original model. The model is applied to Berrick, a recent open-source low-cost robotic head platform, where the gazing is the social signal to be considered

Collaborative Brain-Computer Interfaces in Rapid Image Presentation and Motion Pictures

The last few years have seen an increase in brain-computer interface (BCI) research for the able-bodied population. One of these new branches involves collaborative BCIs (cBCIs), in which information from several users is combined to improve the performance of a BCI system. This thesis is focused on cBCIs with the aim of increasing understanding of how they can be used to improve performance of single-user BCIs based on event-related potentials (ERPs). The objectives are: (1) to study and compare different methods of creating groups using exclusively electroencephalography (EEG) signals, (2) to develop a theoretical model to establish where the highest gains may be expected from creating groups, and (3) to analyse the information that can be extracted by merging signals from multiple users. For this, two scenarios involving real-world stimuli (images presented at high rates and movies) were studied. The first scenario consisted of a visual search task in which images were presented at high frequencies. Three modes of combining EEG recordings from different users were tested to improve the detection of different ERPs, namely the P300 (associated with the presence of events of interest) and the N2pc (associated with shifts of attention). We showed that the detection and localisation of targets can improve significantly when information from multiple viewers is combined. In the second scenario, feature movies were introduced to study variations in ERPs in response to cuts through cBCI techniques. A distinct, previously unreported, ERP appears in relation to such cuts, the amplitude of which is not modulated by visual effects such as the low-level properties of the frames surrounding the discontinuity. However, significant variations that depended on the movie were found. We hypothesise that these techniques can be used to build on the attentional theory of cinematic continuity by providing an extra source of information: the brain