In film gender studies, the concept of 'male gaze' refers to the way the characters are portrayed on-screen as objects of desire rather than subjects. In this article, we introduce a novel video-interpretation task, to detect character objectification in films. The purpose is to reveal and quantify the usage of complex temporal patterns operated in cinema to produce the cognitive perception of objectification. We introduce the ObyGaze12 dataset, made of 1914 movie clips densely annotated by experts for objectification concepts identified in film studies and psychology. We evaluate recent vision models, show the feasibility of the task and where the challenges remain with concept bottleneck models. Our new dataset and code are made available to the community.
@article{arxiv.2401.13296,
title = {Visual Objectification in Films: Towards a New AI Task for Video Interpretation},
author = {Julie Tores and Lucile Sassatelli and Hui-Yin Wu and Clement Bergman and Lea Andolfi and Victor Ecrement and Frederic Precioso and Thierry Devars and Magali Guaresi and Virginie Julliard and Sarah Lecossais},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.13296},
year = {2024}
}