Images and videos can serve as a powerful communications vehicle, conveying a wealth of information as well as emotional impact. The color, composition, content, lighting, sharpness, and movement of an image or a video all contribute to a viewer’s response. High level semantics such as the subject also play a significant role. These characteristics are used extensively by professionals on web sites, magazine covers and printed advertisements to draw attention, communicate a message and leave a lasting emotional impression.
Because images and videos hold such power, people like to use them to tell their own stories. The success of Instagram shows that simple effects can dramatically increase the appeal of images, particularly if it is well integrated into the story telling and social networks.
The fundamental research problems in the understanding of the emotional impact of images and videos are:
- How do we characterize the response categories and levels of emotional impact?
- What attributes of images and videos are associated with their emotional impact?
- What affective models can be used to predict the emotional impact of images?
- How can we use the affective models to rank order images and videos?
- Can we use image and video transformations to change the emotional impact?
- What are the applications of affective models?
We invite submissions that demonstrate improved impact from imaging applications as a direct result of a deep understanding of the emotional properties of images and videos, and their transformations. The evaluation of the solution will be focused on how well the deep understanding of the emotional impact is used to create novel and compelling applications on the web, for the mobile devices, and for social networks.
