A mixed bag of emotions: Model, predict, and transfer emotion distributions

This paper explores two new aspects of photos and human emotions. First, we show through psychovisual studies that different people have different emotional reactions to the same image, which is a strong and novel departure from previous work that only records and predicts a single dominant emotion for each image. Our studies also show that the same person may have multiple emotional reactions to one image. Predicting emotions in “distributions” instead of a single dominant emotion is important for many applications. Second, we show not only that we can often change the evoked emotion of an image by adjusting color tone and texture related features but also that we can choose in which “emotional direction” this change occurs by selecting a target image. In addition, we present a new database, Emotion6, containing distributions of emotions.