CD-MED: Cross-Domain Multimodal Emotion Descriptor for Visual Comparison of Digital Objects

Abstract

Digital objects express emotions through different modalities. For example, a movie may include visual scenes, audio, dialogue, and facial expressions, while a song may contain melody, rhythm, lyrics, and vocal tone. Because existing emotion recognition models are usually modality-specific, it is difficult to compare such objects directly. This paper proposes CD-MED, a Cross-Domain Multimodal Emotion Descriptor for representing heterogeneous digital objects in a common emotional space. Each modality can be processed by its own emotion recognition model, and the resulting emotional outputs are transformed into a shared descriptor. The descriptor preserves information from individual modalities while also allowing an integrated emotional profile of the object. For interpretation, CD-MED is visualized in the valence-arousal space: position represents affective coordinates, color denotes emotion category, size indicates intensity, and shape shows the modality. This unified representation enables emotion-based comparison, retrieval, recommendation, and visualization across different domains such as movies, songs, images, and books.

arXiv commentSubmitted to 2026 Joint 14th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems and 27th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems (SCIS&ISIS 2026)