Every day, people are faced with a huge amount of visual and auditory stimuli, since nowadays music and images are consumer goods that are available anywhere and at any time. The great number of video, image and music files on the users' PCs makes it difficult to maintain the overview and to search for certain content. Existing solutions for media management are mostly difficult to handle, limited in their functionality and not focusing on the users' needs.

In contrast, a new approach is to manage your own media collection by means of semantic characteristics, offering an entirely new possibility. Moreover, users do not have to manually assign keywords to image or music files using cumbersome administration software.

 

Thus, the mood player enables the automatic description of digital photo and music collections with semantic information tags and allows the generation of a music slide show that matches a user-requested mood.

 

The mood player developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau compiles musical slide shows to match how the user feels at the time. From euphoric, relaxed and melancholic to vigorous, the software, which is based on the GenreID music analysis tool, trains the PC to recognize different musical characteristics. Images that suit the mood are automatically added to the playlist and shown at a speed that matches the tempo of the music.

 

For this purpose, the mood player classifies the media in real time and makes the acquired information available in a database. The mood of the images is analyzed on the basis of several distinguishing parameters, including brightness, contrast, edges, colors, textures, layout and shape. Warm colors, for instance, represent friendliness and strong emotions, whereas cold colors have a more calming, distanced and melancholic effect.

 

Factors such as saturation, brightness, structures and the combination and arrangement of different colors are decisive in the image analysis. The pieces of music too are sorted according to mood parameters, such as volume, tone, melody, rhythm, instruments and vocals – automatically, without the need for tedious cataloging. The technology hasn't yet been implemented on a large scale and there is no information available on the period that would happen.

 
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