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

Attentive monitoring of multiple video streams driven by a Bayesian foraging strategy

In this paper we shall consider the problem of deploying attention to subsets of the video streams for collating the most relevant data and information of interest related to a given task. We formalize this monitoring problem as a foraging problem. We propose a probabilistic framework to model observer's attentive behavior as the behavior of a forager. The forager, moment to moment, focuses its attention on the most informative stream/camera, detects interesting objects or activities, or switches to a more profitable stream. The approach proposed here is suitable to be exploited for multi-stream video summarization. Meanwhile, it can serve as a preliminary step for more sophisticated video surveillance, e.g. activity and behavior analysis. Experimental results achieved on the UCR Videoweb Activities Dataset, a publicly available dataset, are presented to illustrate the utility of the proposed technique.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processin

First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Perceptual modelling for 2D and 3D

Livrable D1.1 du projet ANR PERSEECe rapport a été réalisé dans le cadre du projet ANR PERSEE (n° ANR-09-BLAN-0170). Exactement il correspond au livrable D1.1 du projet

How to measure the relevance of a retargeting approach?

International audienceMost cell phones today can receive and display video content. Nonetheless, we are still significantly behind the point where premium made for mobile content is mainstream, largely available, and affordable. Significant issues must be overcome. The small screen size is one of them. Indeed, the direct transfer of conventional contents (not specifically shot for mobile devices) will provide a video in which the main characters or objects of interest may become indistinguishable from the rest of the scene. Therefore, it is required to retarget the content. Different solutions exist, either based on distortion of the image, on removal of redundant areas, or cropping. The most efficient ones are based on dynamic adaptation of the cropping window. They significantly improve the viewing experience by zooming in the regions of interest. Currently, there is no common agreement on how to compare different solutions. A retargeting metric is proposed in order to gauge its quality. Eye-tracking experiments, zooming effect through coverage ratio and temporal consistency are introduced and discussed

The impact of video transcoding parameters on event detection for surveillance systems

The process of transcoding videos apart from being computationally intensive, can also be a rather complex procedure. The complexity refers to the choice of appropriate parameters for the transcoding engine, with the aim of decreasing video sizes, transcoding times and network bandwidth without degrading video quality beyond some threshold that event detectors lose their accuracy. This paper explains the need for transcoding, and then studies different video quality metrics. Commonly used algorithms for motion and person detection are briefly described, with emphasis in investigating the optimum transcoding configuration parameters. The analysis of the experimental results reveals that the existing video quality metrics are not suitable for automated systems, and that the detection of persons is affected by the reduction of bit rate and resolution, while motion detection is more sensitive to frame rate

Sparsity Based Spatio-Temporal Video Quality Assessment

In this thesis, we present an abstract view of Image and Video quality assessment algorithms. Most of the research in the area of quality assessment is focused on the scenario where the end-user is a human observer and therefore commonly known as perceptual quality assessment. In this thesis, we discuss Full Reference Video Quality Assessment and No Reference image quality assessment