Context-aware affective images classification based on bilayer sparse representation

Abstract

In image understanding, the automatic recognition of emotion in an image is becoming important from an applicative viewpoint. Considering the fact that the emotion evoked by an image is not only from its global appearance but also interplays among local regions, we propose a novel context-aware classification model based on bilayer sparse representation (BSR) that simultaneously takes the local context and global-local context into account. The BSR model contains two layers: global sparse representation (GSR) and local sparse representation (LSR). The GSR is to define global similarities between a test image and all training images; while the LSR is to define similarities of local regions' appearances and their co-occurrence between a test image and all training images. The experiments on two data sets demonstrate that our method is effective on affective images classification.