Thierry Pun

Bio: Thierry Pun is an academic researcher from University of Geneva. The author has contributed to research in topics: Digital watermarking & Watermark. The author has an hindex of 49, co-authored 358 publications receiving 15919 citations. Previous affiliations of Thierry Pun include National Institutes of Health & École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

DEAP: A Database for Emotion Analysis ;Using Physiological Signals

Abstract: We present a multimodal data set for the analysis of human affective states. The electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals of 32 participants were recorded as each watched 40 one-minute long excerpts of music videos. Participants rated each video in terms of the levels of arousal, valence, like/dislike, dominance, and familiarity. For 22 of the 32 participants, frontal face video was also recorded. A novel method for stimuli selection is proposed using retrieval by affective tags from the last.fm website, video highlight detection, and an online assessment tool. An extensive analysis of the participants' ratings during the experiment is presented. Correlates between the EEG signal frequencies and the participants' ratings are investigated. Methods and results are presented for single-trial classification of arousal, valence, and like/dislike ratings using the modalities of EEG, peripheral physiological signals, and multimedia content analysis. Finally, decision fusion of the classification results from different modalities is performed. The data set is made publicly available and we encourage other researchers to use it for testing their own affective state estimation methods.

A Multimodal Database for Affect Recognition and Implicit Tagging

Abstract: MAHNOB-HCI is a multimodal database recorded in response to affective stimuli with the goal of emotion recognition and implicit tagging research. A multimodal setup was arranged for synchronized recording of face videos, audio signals, eye gaze data, and peripheral/central nervous system physiological signals. Twenty-seven participants from both genders and different cultural backgrounds participated in two experiments. In the first experiment, they watched 20 emotional videos and self-reported their felt emotions using arousal, valence, dominance, and predictability as well as emotional keywords. In the second experiment, short videos and images were shown once without any tag and then with correct or incorrect tags. Agreement or disagreement with the displayed tags was assessed by the participants. The recorded videos and bodily responses were segmented and stored in a database. The database is made available to the academic community via a web-based system. The collected data were analyzed and single modality and modality fusion results for both emotion recognition and implicit tagging experiments are reported. These results show the potential uses of the recorded modalities and the significance of the emotion elicitation protocol.

A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis

Abstract: A visual attention system, inspired by the behavior and the neuronal architecture of the early primate visual system, is presented. Multiscale image features are combined into a single topographical saliency map. A dynamical neural network then selects attended locations in order of decreasing saliency. The system breaks down the complex problem of scene understanding by rapidly selecting, in a computationally efficient manner, conspicuous locations to be analyzed in detail.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Beyond Bags of Features: Spatial Pyramid Matching for Recognizing Natural Scene Categories

Abstract: This paper presents a method for recognizing scene categories based on approximate global geometric correspondence. This technique works by partitioning the image into increasingly fine sub-regions and computing histograms of local features found inside each sub-region. The resulting "spatial pyramid" is a simple and computationally efficient extension of an orderless bag-of-features image representation, and it shows significantly improved performance on challenging scene categorization tasks. Specifically, our proposed method exceeds the state of the art on the Caltech-101 database and achieves high accuracy on a large database of fifteen natural scene categories. The spatial pyramid framework also offers insights into the success of several recently proposed image descriptions, including Torralba’s "gist" and Lowe’s SIFT descriptors.