1 ELVIS: Entertainment-Led Video Summaries

Video summaries present the user with a condensed and succinct representation of the content of a video stream. Usually this is achieved by attaching degrees of importance to low-level image, audio and text features. However, video content elicits strong and measurable physiological responses in the user, which are potentially rich indicators of what video content is memorable to or emotionally engaging for an individual user. This paper proposes a technique which exploits such physiological responses to a given video stream by a given user to produce Entertainment-Led VIdeo Summaries (ELVIS). ELVIS is made up of five analysis phases which correspond to the analyses of five physiological response measures: electro-dermal response (EDR), heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), respiration rate (RR), and respiration amplitude (RA). Through these analyses, the temporal locations of the most entertaining video sub-segments, as they occur within the video stream as a whole, are automatically identified. We also demonstrate how ELVIS can be integrated into video summary applications by presenting a media player that utilises ELVIS. The effectiveness of the ELVIS technique is verified through a statistical analysis of data collected during a set of user trials. Our analysis shows that ELVIS is significantly more effective than random selection in identifying the most entertaining video sub-segments for content in the comedy, horror/comedy, and horror genres