Multimodal approach to measuring excitement in video

We present in this paper an approach to mimic the excitement that is evoked in a user while watching a video. The proposed approach is meant to enhance user's comfort when dealing with large amount of broadcasted digital television data reaching his home. For this reason, we deliberately avoid using any sensors placed on users: the simulation of user excitement is based here solely on cues that are available in the digital video stream, and that can be extracted by using standard audio and video processing tools as well as by observing the way video is edited. Relation between the extracted features and evoked excitement is drawn partly from psycho-physiological research and partly from analyzing the video generation practice. Our methodology is generic and can be employed broadly in the process of video abstraction and for revealing the affective characteristics of video content.