Representing pictures with emotions

Modern research in content-based image retrieval systems (CIBR) has become progressively more focused on the richness of human semantics. Several approaches may be used to reduced the 'semantic gap' between the high-level human experience and the low level visual features of pictures. Object ontology, among others, is one of the methods. In this paper we investigate the use of a codified emotion ontology over global color features of images to annotate the images at a high semantic level. In order to speed up the annotation process the images are sampled so that each digital image is represented by a random subset of its content. We test within controlled conditions how this random subset may represent the adequate high level emotional concept presented in the image. We monitor this information reducing process with entropy measures, showing that controlled random sampling can capture with significant relevance high level concepts for picture representation.