Scaring or pleasing

Automatic image emotion analysis has emerged as a hot topic due to its potential application on high-level image understanding. Considering the fact that the emotion evoked by an image is not only from its global appearance but also interplays among local regions, we propose a novel affective image classification system based on bilayer sparse representation (BSR). The BSR model contains two layers: The global sparse representation (GSR) is to define global similarities between a test image and all the training images; and the local sparse representation (LSR) is to define similarities of local regions' appearances and their co-occurrence between a test image and all the training images. The experiments on real data sets demonstrate that our system is effective on image emotion recognition.