Janto Skowronek

Automatic surveillance of the acoustic activity in our living environment

We report an experiment with an acoustic surveillance system comprised of a computer and microphone situated in a typical office environment. The system continuously analyzes the acoustic activity at the recording site, separates all interesting events, and stores them in a database. All interesting acoustic events over duration of more than two months were recorded. A number of low-level signal features are computed from the audio signal and used to classify and identify sound events. The analysis reveals interesting patterns and activities which would be difficult to find by any other means.

Towards a Ground Truth for Affective Classification in Movies

Automatic affective movie classification can be a powerful technology that can facilitate searching, recommending and play listing of movies. In the process of developing a good classification system, the identification of suitable classes and the selection of proper training material is crucial. In this paper we describe the process of developing a reliable ground truth database that will be used for automated classification of emotions conveyed in movies. We identify a list of emotion labels that people commonly use to describe emotions in movies and employ them to annotate movie fragments. The most adequate fragments are then selected to form the final ground truth database which can later be used for affective classification in movies.