Joint Image Emotion Classification and Distribution Learning via Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Visual sentiment analysis is attracting more and more attention with the increasing tendency to express emotions through visual contents. Recent algorithms in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) considerably advance the emotion classification, which aims to distinguish differences among emotional categories and assigns a single dominant label to each image. However, the task is inherently ambiguous since an image usually evokes multiple emotions and its annotation varies from person to person. In this work, we address the problem via label distribution learning and develop a multi-task deep framework by jointly optimizing classification and distribution prediction. While the proposed method prefers to the distribution datasets with annotations of different voters, the majority voting scheme is widely adopted as the ground truth in this area, and few dataset has provided multiple affective labels. Hence, we further exploit two weak forms of prior knowledge, which are expressed as similarity information between labels, to generate emotional distribution for each category. The experiments conducted on both distribution datasets, i.e. Emotion6, Flickr LDL, Twitter LDL, and the largest single label dataset, i.e. Flickr and Instagram, demonstrate the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.