A major barrier to the development of accurate and realistic models of human emotions is the absence of multi-cultural / multilingual databases of real-life behaviours and of a federative and reliable annotation protocol. QUB and LIMSI teams are working towards the definition of an integrated coding scheme combining their complementary approaches. This multilevel integrated scheme combines the dimensions that appear to be useful for the study of real-life emotions: verbal labels, abstract dimensions and contextual (appraisal based) annotations. This paper describes this integrated coding scheme, a protocol that was set-up for annotating French and English video clips of emotional interviews and the results (e.g. inter-coder agreement measures and subjective evaluation of the scheme).

There has been a lot of psychological researches on emotion and nonverbal communication. Yet, these studies were based mostly on acted basic emotions. This paper explores how manual annotation and image processing can cooperate towards the representation of spontaneous emotional behaviour in low resolution videos from TV. We describe a corpus of TV interviews and the manual annotations that have been defined. We explain the image processing algorithms that have been designed for the automatic estimation of movement quantity. Finally, we explore how image processing can be used for the validation of manual annotations.

Research on emotional real-life data has to tackle the problem of their annotation. The annotation of emotional corpora raises the issue of how different coders perceive the same multimodal emotional behaviour. The long-term goal of this paper is to produce a guideline for the selection of annotators. The LIMSI team is working towards the definition of a coding scheme integrating emotion, context and multimodal annotations. We present the current defined coding scheme for emotion annotation, and the use of soft vectors for representing a mixture of emotions. This paper describes a perceptive test of emotion annotations and the results obtained with 40 different coders on a subset of complex real-life emotional segments selected from the EmoTV Corpus collected at LIMSI. The results of this first study validate previous annotations of emotion mixtures and highlight the difference of annotation between male and female coders.