Visual affective classification by combining visual and text features

PLoS One. 2017 Aug 29;12(8):e0183018. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183018. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Affective analysis of images in social networks has drawn much attention, and the texts surrounding images are proven to provide valuable semantic meanings about image content, which can hardly be represented by low-level visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for visual affective classification (VAC) task. This approach combines visual representations along with novel text features through a fusion scheme based on Dempster-Shafer (D-S) Evidence Theory. Specifically, we not only investigate different types of visual features and fusion methods for VAC, but also propose textual features to effectively capture emotional semantics from the short text associated to images based on word similarity. Experiments are conducted on three public available databases: the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), the Artistic Photos and the MirFlickr Affect set. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach combining visual and textual features provides promising results for VAC task.

MeSH terms

  • Databases, Factual
  • Emotions / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval
  • Photic Stimulation / methods*
  • Semantics

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (51435011, 51505309), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central University in UIBE (14QD21) and the Sichuan Province Science and Technology Support Program Project under Grant 2015JY0172. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.