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US 20090195392, Sony's laugh detector patent application

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

The abstract for Sony's patent application 12/023951 titled LAUGH DETECTOR AND SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TRACKING AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO A MEDIA PRESENTATION includes QUESTIONS:

Information in the form of emotional responses to a media presentation may be passively collected, for example by a microphone and/or a camera. This information may be tied to metadata at a time reference level in the media presentation and used to examine the content of the media presentation to assess a quality of, or user emotional response to, the content and/or to project the information onto a demographic. Passive collection of emotional responses may be used to add emotion as an element of speech or facial expression detection, to make use of such information, for example to judge the quality of content or to judge the nature of various individuals for future content that is to be provided to them or to those similarly situated demographically. Thus, the invention asks and answers such questions as: What makes people happy? What makes them laugh? What do they find interesting? Boring? Exciting?

Claim 1 states:

An apparatus for passively collecting information in the form of emotional responses to a media presentation, comprising:a media presentation perceivably exhibited to at least one individual;a detector for capturing emotional responses of said at least one individual to said media presentation during exhibition of said media presentation;a processor for correlating said emotional responses with portions of said media presentation which contained stimuli that elicited said emotional responses.

The background states:

[0002]Khiet P. Truong and David A. van Leeuwen, Automatic discrimination between laughter and speech, Speech Communication, Volume 49, Issue 2, February 2007, Pages 144-158 suggest a technique that detects laughter as a component of speech. As well, Carlos Busso, Zhigang Deng, Serdar Yildirim, Murtaza Bulut, Chul Min Lee, Abe Kazemzadeh, Sungbok Lee, Ulrich Neumann, Shrikanth Narayanan, Analysis of Emotion Recognition using Facial Expressions, Speech and Multimodal Information, Emotion Research Group, Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab, Integrated Media Systems Center, Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, http://sail.usc.edu. have suggested a technique that detects emotion from facial expressions

[0003]Unfortunately, there is as yet no suggestion to engage in passive collection of emotional responses during playback of media to judge or analyze the quality of segments of content or to assess the quality of content with respect to attributes of the content, user profiling, demographic mining and targeting of future content. Thus, there is a need in the art, for a technique that both recognizes emotionand that employs this information in some useful way.

Full post as published by IPBiz on August 20, 2009 (boomark / email).