From Pixels to Sentiment: Fine-tuning CNNs for Visual Sentiment Prediction

Visual multimedia have become an inseparable part of our digital social lives, and they often capture moments tied with deep affections. Automated visual sentiment analysis tools can provide a means of extracting the rich feelings and latent dispositions embedded in these media. In this work, we explore how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a now de facto computational machine learning tool particularly in the area of Computer Vision, can be specifically applied to the task of visual sentiment prediction. We accomplish this through fine-tuning experiments using a state-of-the-art CNN and via rigorous architecture analysis, we present several modifications that lead to accuracy improvements over prior art on a dataset of images from a popular social media platform. We additionally present visualizations of local patterns that the network learned to associate with image sentiment for insight into how visual positivity (or negativity) is perceived by the model.Comment: Accepted for publication in Image and Vision Computing. Models and source code available at https://github.com/imatge-upc/sentiment-201

Diving Deep into Sentiment: Understanding Fine-tuned CNNs for Visual Sentiment Prediction

Visual media are powerful means of expressing emotions and sentiments. The constant generation of new content in social networks highlights the need of automated visual sentiment analysis tools. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have established a new state-of-the-art in several vision problems, their application to the task of sentiment analysis is mostly unexplored and there are few studies regarding how to design CNNs for this purpose. In this work, we study the suitability of fine-tuning a CNN for visual sentiment prediction as well as explore performance boosting techniques within this deep learning setting. Finally, we provide a deep-dive analysis into a benchmark, state-of-the-art network architecture to gain insight about how to design patterns for CNNs on the task of visual sentiment prediction.Comment: Preprint of the paper accepted at the 1st Workshop on Affect and Sentiment in Multimedia (ASM), in ACM MultiMedia 2015. Brisbane, Australi