FunnyNet: Audiovisual Learning of Funny Moments in Videos

Zhisong Liu, Robin Courant, Vicky Kalogeiton; Proceedings of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2022, pp. 3308-3325

Automatically understanding funny moments (i.e., the moments that make people laugh) when watching comedy is challenging, as they relate to various features, such as facial expression, body language, dialogues and culture. In this paper, we propose FunnyNet, a model that relies on cross- and self-attention for both visual and audio data to predict funny moments in videos. Unlike most methods that focus on text with or without visual data to identify funny moments, in this work in addition to visual cues, we exploit audio. Audio comes naturally with videos, and moreover it contains higher-level cues associated with funny moments, such as intonation, pitch and pauses. To acquire labels for training, we propose an unsupervised approach that spots and labels funny audio moments. We provide experiments on five datasets: the sitcoms TBBT, MHD, MUStARD, Friends, and the TED talk UR-Funny. Extensive experiments and analysis show that FunnyNet successfully exploits visual and auditory cues to identify funny moments, while our findings corroborate our claim that audio is more suitable than text for funny moment prediction. FunnyNet sets the new state of the art for laughter detection with audiovisual or multimodal cues on all datasets.