CREATING JOYFUL DIGESTS BY EXPLOITING SMILE/LAUGHTER FACIAL EXPRESSIONS PRESENT IN VIDEO

Video digests provide an effective way of confirming a video content rapidly due to their very compact form. By watching a digest, users can easily check whether a specific content is worth seeing in full. The impression created by the digest greatly influences the user's choice in selecting video contents. We propose a novel method of automatic digest creation that evokes a joyful impression through the created digest by exploiting smile/laughter facial expressions as emotional cues of joy from video. We assume that a digest presenting smiling/laughing faces appeals to the user since he/she is assured that the smile/laughter expression is caused by joyful events inside the video. For detecting smile/laughter faces we have developed a neural network based method for classifying facial expressions. Video segmentation is performed by automatic shot detection. For creating joyful digests, appropriate shots are automatically selected by shot ranking based on the smile/laughter detection result. We report the results of user trials conducted for assessing the visual impression with automatically created 'joyful' digests produced by our system. The results show that users tend to prefer emotional digests containing laughter faces. This result suggests that the attractiveness of automatically created video digests can be improved by extracting emotional cues of the contents through automatic facial expression analysis as proposed in this paper.