Zongyang (Zane) Qiu 「邱宗扬」

Abstract: Emotion is important for creating compelling virtual reality (VR) content. Although some generative methods have been applied to lower the barrier to creating emotionally rich content, they fail to capture the nuanced emotional semantics and the fine-grained control essential for immersive experiences. To address these limitations, we introduce EmoSpace, a novel framework for emotion-aware content generation that learns dynamic, interpretable emotion prototypes through vision-language alignment. We employ a hierarchical emotion representation with rich learnable prototypes that evolve during training, enabling fine-grained emotional control without requiring explicit emotion labels. We develop a controllable generation pipeline featuring multi-prototype guidance, temporal blending, and attention reweighting that supports diverse applications, including emotional image outpainting, stylized generation, and emotional panorama generation for VR environments. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of EmoSpace over existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Additionally, we present a comprehensive user study investigating how VR environments affect emotional perception compared to desktop settings. Our work facilitates immersive visual content generation with fine-grained emotion control and supports applications like therapy, education, storytelling, artistic creation, and cultural preservation. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Abstract: Emotion plays a pivotal role in video-based expression, but existing video generation systems predominantly focus on low-level visual metrics while neglecting affective dimensions. Although emotion analysis has made progress in the visual domain, the video community lacks dedicated resources to bridge emotion understanding with generative tasks, particularly for stylized and non-realistic contexts. To address this gap, we introduce EmoVid, the first multimodal, emotion-annotated video dataset specifically designed for creative media, which includes cartoon animations, movie clips, and animated stickers. Each video is annotated with emotion labels, visual attributes (brightness, colorfulness, hue), and text captions. Through systematic analysis, we uncover spatial and temporal patterns linking visual features to emotional perceptions across diverse video forms. Building on these insights, we develop an emotion-conditioned video generation technique by fine-tuning the Wan2.1 model. The results show a significant improvement in both quantitative metrics and the visual quality of generated videos for text-to-video and image-to-video tasks. EmoVid establishes a new benchmark for affective video computing. Our work not only offers valuable insights into visual emotion analysis in artistically styled videos, but also provides practical methods for enhancing emotional expression in video generation.