Estimating Psychological Impressions from Color Images Using Earth Mover’s Distance

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a method for estimating psychological impressions (e.g., “Pretty”, “Elegant”, “Romantic”, “Cool”, “Formal”, etc) from color images. Essentially, the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) is employed to map a given image onto the color image scale, a two-dimensional emotion space comprised of a WARM-COOL axis and a SOFT-HARD axis, on which many color combinations and Kansei words are located. To validate our proposed method, we collected real images from the Web and compared our EMD-based results with human evaluation results. The comparison demonstrated that EMD-based Kansei mapping is a promising method for extracting psychological impressions from color images.