# High-Level Concepts for Affective Understanding of Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.02751 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02751/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Affective Image Content Analysis: Two Decades Review and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16125/) (2021)
- [Affect2MM: Affective Analysis of Multimedia Content Using Emotion Causality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06541/) (2021)
- [Dilated Context Integrated Network with Cross-Modal Consensus for Temporal Emotion Localization in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01954/) (2022)
- [Level of agreement between emotions generated by Artificial Intelligence and human evaluation: a methodological proposal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08332/) (2024)
- [EmoLat: Text-driven Image Sentiment Transfer via Emotion Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12079/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to bridge the affective gap between image content and the emotional response of the viewer it elicits by using High-Level Concepts (HLCs). In contrast to previous work that relied solely on low-level features or used convolutional neural network (CNN) as a black-box, we use HLCs generated by pretrained CNNs in an explicit way to investigate the relations/associations between these HLCs and a (small) set of Ekman's emotional classes. As a proof-of-concept, we first propose a linear admixture model for modeling these relations, and the resulting computational framework allows us to determine the associations between each emotion class and certain HLCs (objects and places). This linear model is further extended to a nonlinear model using support vector regression (SVR) that aims to predict the viewer's emotional response using both low-level image features and HLCs extracted from images. These class-specific regressors are then assembled into a regressor ensemble that provide a flexible and effective predictor for predicting viewer's emotional responses from images. Experimental results have demonstrated that our results are comparable to existing methods, with a clear view of the association between HLCs and emotional classes that is ostensibly missing in most existing work.