Affective Video Content Analysis: Decade Review and New Perspectives

Video content is rich in semantics and has the ability to evoke various emotions in viewers. In recent years, with the rapid development of affective computing and the explosive growth of visual data, Affective Video Content Analysis (AVCA) as an essential branch of affective computing has become a widely researched topic. In this study, we comprehensively review the development of AVCA over the past decade, particularly focusing on the most advanced methods adopted to address the three major challenges of video feature extraction, expression subjectivity, and multimodal feature fusion. We first introduce the widely used emotion representation models in AVCA and describe commonly used datasets. We summarize and compare representative methods in the following aspects: (1) unimodal AVCA models, including facial expression recognition and posture emotion recognition; (2) multimodal AVCA models, including feature fusion, decision fusion, and attention-based multimodal models; and (3) model performance evaluation standards. Finally, we discuss future challenges and promising research directions, such as emotion recognition and public opinion analysis, human-computer interaction, and emotional intelligence.