Multimedia stimuli databases usage patterns: a survey report
This addresses the problem of inefficient and inadequate multimedia stimuli for researchers in affective computing and related fields, but it is incremental as it surveys existing issues without proposing a new solution.
The paper conducted a survey on usage patterns of affective multimedia databases, finding that 73.33% of participants report deficiencies in semantic and emotional content, and 84% desire real-life videos, highlighting the need for better tools.
Multimedia documents such as images, sounds or videos can be used to elicit emotional responses in exposed human subjects. These stimuli are stored in affective multimedia databases and successfully used for a wide variety of research in affective computing, human-computer interaction and cognitive sciences. Affective multimedia databases are simple repositories of multimedia documents with annotated high-level semantics and affective content. Although important all affective multimedia databases have numerous deficiencies which impair their applicability. To establish a better understanding of how experts use affective multimedia databases an online survey was conducted into the subject. The survey results are statistically significant and indicate that contemporary databases lack stimuli with rich semantic and emotional content. 73.33% of survey participants find the databases lacking at least some important semantic or emotion content. Most of the participants consider stimuli descriptions to be inadequate. Overall, 1-2h or more than 24h are generally needed to construct a single stimulation sequence. Almost 84% of the survey participants would like to use real-life videos in their research. Experts unequivocally recognize the need for an intelligent stimuli retrieval application that would assist them in experimentation. Almost all experts agree such applications could be useful in their work.