1. Detection of Violent Scenes using Affective Features
Esra Acar
Competence Center Information Retrieval and Machine Learning
4. October 2012

2. ▶ Motivation
▶ Background
▶ The Method
 Audio Features
 Visual Features
▶ Results & Discussion
▶ Conclusions & Future Work
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3. ▶ The MediaEval 2012 Affect Task aims at detecting violent
segments in movies.
▶ A recent work on horror scene recognition detects horror
scenes by affect-related features.
▶ We investigate whether
 affect-related features provide good representation of
violence, and
 making abstractions from low-level features is better than
directly using low-level data.
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4. ▶ The affective content of a video corresponds to
 the intensity (i.e. arousal), and
 the type (i.e. valence) of emotion
expected to arise in the user while watching that video.
▶ Recent research efforts propose methods to map low-level
features to high-level emotions.
▶ Film-makers intend to elicit some particular emotions (i.e.
expected emotions) in the audience.
▶ When we refer to violence as an expected emotion in
videos, affect-related features are applicable for violence
detection.
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5. ▶ The method uses affect-related audio and visual features to
represent violence.
▶ Low-level audio and visual features are extracted.
▶ Mid-level audio features are generated based on the low-
level ones.
▶ The audio and visual features are then fused at the feature-
level and a two-class SVM is trained.
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6. ▶ Affect-related audio features used in the work are:
 Audio energy
 related to the arousal aspect.
 high/low energy corresponds to high/low emotion intensity.
 used for vocal emotion detection.
 Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)
 related to the arousal aspect.
 works well for the detection of excitement/non-excitement.
 Pitch
 related to the valence aspect.
 significant for emotion detection in speech and music.
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7. ▶ Each video shot has different numbers of audio energy, pitch and
MFCC feature vectors (due to varying shot durations).
▶ Audio representations are obtained by computing mean and
standard deviation for these audio features.
▶ Abstraction for MFCC:
 MFCC-based Bag of Audio Words (BoAW) approach is chosen to
generate mid-level audio representations.
 Two different audio vocabularies are constructed: violence and
non-violence vocabularies (by k-means clustering).
 MFCC of violent/non-violent movie segments are used to
construct violence/non-violence words.
 Violence and non-violence word occurrences within a video shot
are represented by a BoAW histogram.
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8. ▶ Average motion
 related to the arousal aspect.
 Motion vectors are computed using block-based motion
estimation.
 Average motion is found as the average magnitude of all
motion vectors.
▶ We compute average motion around the keyframe of video
shots.
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9. ▶ The performance of our method was assessed on 3
Hollywood movies (evaluation criteria: MAP at 100).
▶ We submitted five runs:
 r1-low-level: low-level audio and visual features,
 Runs based on mid-level audio and low-level visual features
 r2-mid-level-100k: 100k samples for dictionary construction,
 r3-mid-level-300k: 300k samples for dictionary construction,
 r4-mid-level-300k-default: 300k samples for dictionary
construction + SVM default parameters, and
 r5-mid-level-500k: 500k samples for dictionary construction.
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10. Table 1 – Precision, Recall and F-measure at shot level
Run AED-P AED-R AED-F
r1-low-level 0.141 0.597 0.2287
r2-mid-level-100k 0.140 0.629 0.2285
r3-mid-level-300k 0.144 0.625 0.2337
r4-mid-level-300k-default 0.190 0.627 0.2971
r5-mid-level-500k 0.154 0.603 0.2457
Table 2 – Mean Average Precision (MAP) values at 20 and 100
Run MAP at 20 MAP at 100
r1-low-level 0.2132 0.18502
r2-mid-level-100k 0.2037 0.14492
r3-mid-level-300k 0.3593 0.18538
r4-mid-level-300k-default 0.1547 0.15083
r5-mid-level-500k 0.15 0.11527
▶ Slightly better performance is achieved with mid-level representations compared
to the low-level one.
▶ Using affect-related features to describe violence needs some improvements
(especially the visual part).
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11. ▶ The aim of this work was to investigate whether affect-
related features are well-suited to describe violence.
▶ Affect-related audio and visual features are merged in a
supervised manner using SVM.
▶ Our main finding is that more sophisticated affect-related
features are necessary to describe the content of videos
(especially the visual part).
▶ Our next step in this work is to use
 mid-level features such as human facial features, and
 more sophisticated motion descriptors such as Lagrangian
measures
for video content representation.
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12. Thank you!
Questions?
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