Search

Improvised acting is a viable technique to study expressive human communication and to shed light into actors' creativity. The USC CreativeIT database provides a novel, freely-available multimodal resource for the study of theatrical improvisation and rich expressive human behavior (speech and body language) in dyadic interactions. The theoretical design of the database is based on the well-established improvisation technique of Active Analysis in order to provide naturally induced affective and expressive, goal-driven interactions. This database contains dyadic theatrical improvisations performed by 16 actors, providing detailed full body motion capture data and audio data of each participant in an interaction. The carefully engineered data collection, the improvisation design to elicit natural emotions and expressive speech and body language, as well as the well-developed annotation processes provide a gateway to study and model various aspects of theatrical performance, expressive behaviors and human communication and interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since emotions are expressed through a combination of verbal and non-verbal channels, a joint analysis of speech and gestures is required to understand expressive human communication. To facilitate such investigations, this paper describes a new corpus named the “interactive emotional dyadic motion capture database” (IEMOCAP), collected by the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at the University of Southern California (USC). This database was recorded from ten actors in dyadic sessions with markers on the face, head, and hands, which provide detailed information about their facial expressions and hand movements during scripted and spontaneous spoken communication scenarios. The actors performed selected emotional scripts and also improvised hypothetical scenarios designed to elicit specific types of emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, frustration and neutral state). The corpus contains approximately 12 h of data. The detailed motion capture information, the interactive setting to elicit authentic emotions, and the size of the database make this corpus a valuable addition to the existing databases in the community for the study and modeling of multimodal and expressive human communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]