Unsupervised feature learning assisted visual sentiment analysis

Visual sentiment analysis which aims to understand the emotion and sentiment in visual content has attracted more and more attention. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach for visual sentiment concept classification with an unsupervised feature learning architecture called convolutional autoencoder. We first extract a representative set of unlabeled patches from the image dataset and discover useful features of these patches with sparse autoencoders. Then we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to obtain feature activations on full images for sentiment concept classification. We also fine-tune the network with a progressive strategy in order to filter out noisy samples in the weakly labeled training data. Meanwhile, we use low-level visual features to classify visual sentiment concepts in a traditional manner. At last the classification results with unsupervised feature learning and that with traditional features are taken into account together with a fusion algorithm to make a final prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets reveal that the proposed approach can achieve better performance in visual sentiment analysis compared to its predecessors. © 2016 SERSC.