Emotion recognition in natural scene images based on brain activity and gist

Artificial emotion study will be of utmost importance in future artificial intelligence research. In this paper, an emotion understanding system based on brain activity and ldquoGISTrdquo is newly proposed to categorize emotions reflected by natural scenes. According to the strong relationship of human emotion and the brain activity, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) are used to analyze and classify emotional states stimulated by a natural scene. The ldquoGISTrdquo is used to represent the emotional gist of the natural scene. In other words, by taking the way human brain responding to the same stimulus into consideration, a machine will be able to visually extract the emotional features of natural scenes and achieve interaction with a human in terms of emotional sharing. The experimental results show that positive and negative emotions can be distinguished, and a monkey robot head that can share emotion with human subject during watching an image is implemented.