We investigated how shape features in natural images influence emotions aroused in human beings. Shapes and their characteristics such as roundness, angularity, simplicity, and complexity have been postulated to affect the emotional responses of human beings in the field of visual arts and psychology. However, no prior research has modeled the dimensionality of emotions aroused by roundness and angularity. Our contributions include an in-depth statistical analysis to understand the relationship between shapes and emotions. Through experimental results on the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) dataset we provide evidence for the significance of roundness-angularity and simplicitycomplexity on predicting emotional content in images. We combine our shape features with other state-of-theart features to show a gain in prediction and classification accuracy. We model emotions from a dimensional perspective in order to predict valence and arousal ratings which have advantages over modeling the traditional discrete emotional categories. Finally, we distinguish images with strong emotional content from emotionally neutral images with high accuracy.
Lu, et al. REF investigate through statistical analysis how shapes are related to emotions in natural images.
On shape and the computability of emotions
Proceedings of the ... ACM International Conference on Multimedia, with co-located Symposium & Workshops. ACM International Conference on Multimedia
Proceedings of the ... ACM International Conference on Multimedia, with co-located Symposium & Workshops. ACM International Conference on Multimedia
Medicine Computer Science