Beyond visual cues: Emotion recognition in images with text-aware fusion☆

Sentiment analysis is a widely studied problem for understanding human emotions and potential outcomes. As it can be performed over textual data, working on visual data elements is also critically substantial to examining the current emotional status. In this effort, the aim is to investigate any potential enhancements in sentiment analysis predictions through visual instances by integrating textual data as additional knowledge reflecting the contextual information of the images. Thus, two separate models have been developed as image-processing and text-processing models in which both models were trained on distinct datasets comprising the same five human emotions. Following, the outputs of the individual models' last dense layers are combined to construct the hybrid multimodel empowered by visual and textual components. The fundamental focus is to evaluate the performance of the hybrid model in which the textual knowledge is concatenated with visual data. Essentially, the hybrid model achieved nearly a 3% F1-score improvement compared to the plain image classification model utilizing convolutional neural network architecture. In essence, this research underscores the potency of fusing textual context with visual information to refine sentiment analysis predictions. The findings not only emphasize the potential of a multi-modal approach but also spotlight a promising avenue for future advancements in emotion analysis and understanding.