VSD, a public dataset for the detection of violent scenes in movies: design, annotation, analysis and evaluation

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications Vol. 74; no. 17; pp. 7379 - 7404
• Main Authors: Demarty, Claire-Hélène, Penet, Cédric, Soleymani, Mohammad, Gravier, Guillaume
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.09.2015; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Verlag
• Subjects: Analysis; Annotations; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Content analysis; Data Structures and Information Theory; Datasets; Design engineering; Engineering Sciences; Motion pictures; Multimedia; Multimedia computer applications; Multimedia Information Systems; Ratings & rankings; Semantics; Signal and Image Processing; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Studies; Surveillance; Tasks; Violence; Visual; Semantic audio concepts; Semantic video concepts; Content-based analysis; Physical violence definition; Violent scene detection; Multimedia evaluation; Corpus design
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-014-1984-4

Content-based analysis to find where violence appears in multimedia content has several applications, from parental control and children protection to surveillance. This paper presents the design and annotation of the Violent Scene Detection dataset, a corpus targeting the detection of physical violence in Hollywood movies. We discuss definitions of physical violence and provide a simple and objective definition which was used to annotate a set of 18 movies, thus resulting in the largest freely-available dataset for such a task. We discuss borderline cases and compare with annotations based on a subjective definition which requires multiple annotators. We provide a detailed analysis of the corpus, in particular regarding the relationship between violence and a set of key audio and visual concepts which were also annotated. The VSD dataset results from two years of benchmarking in the framework of the MediaEval initiative. We provide results from the 2011 and 2012 benchmarks as a validation of the dataset and as a state-of-the-art baseline. The VSD dataset is freely available at the address: http://www.technicolor.com/en/innovation/research-innovation/scientific-data-sharing/violent-scenes-dataset. .