Affective abstract image classification and retrieval using multiple kernel learning

Emotional semantic image retrieval systems aim at incorporating the user's affective states for responding adequately to the user's interests. One challenge is to select features specific to image affect detection. Another challenge is to build effective learning models or classifiers to bridge the so-called "affective gap". In this work, we study the affective classification and retrieval of abstract images by applying multiple kernel learning framework. An image can be represented by different feature spaces and multiple kernel learning can utilize all these feature representations simultaneously (i.e., multiview learning), such that it jointly learns the feature representation weights and corresponding classifier in an intelligent manner. Our experimental results on two abstract image datasets demonstrate the advantage of the multiple kernel learning framework for image affect detection in terms of feature selection, classification performance, and interpretation.