# Automatic Image Transformation for Inducing Affect

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2017.

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

- [Regressor-Guided Image Editing Shifts Emotion and Disengagement Timing in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12289/) (2025)
- [AffectDelta: Beyond Emotion Labels for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02616/) (2026)
- [EmoLat: Text-driven Image Sentiment Transfer via Emotion Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12079/) (2026)
- [EMOVIS: Emotion-Optimized Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03131/) (2026)
- [Learned Parametric Emotion Editing: Real-Time Affective Filtering for On-Device Social Media Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current image transformation and recoloring algorithms try to introduce artistic effects in the photographed images, based on user input of target image(s) or selection of pre-designed filters. These manipulations, although intended to enhance the impact of an image on the viewer, do not include the option of image transformation by specifying the affect information. In this paper we present an automatic image-transformation method that transforms the source image such that it can induce an emotional affect on the viewer, as desired by the user. Our proposed novel image emotion transfer algorithm does not require a user-specified target image. The proposed algorithm uses features extracted from top layers of deep convolutional neural network and the user-specified emotion distribution to select multiple target images from an image database for color transformation, such that the resultant image has desired emotional impact. Our method can handle more diverse set of photographs than the previous methods. We conducted a detailed user study showing the effectiveness of our proposed method. A discussion and reasoning of failure cases has also been provided, indicating inherent limitation of color-transfer based methods in the use of emotion assignment. Project Page: http://im.itu.edu.pk/affective-image-transfer/