IEEE Access (Jan 2019)

A Novel Method for Emotion Extraction From Paintings Based on Luscher’s Psychological Color Test: Case Study Iranian-Islamic Paintings

  • Babak Ranjgar,
  • Mahdi Khoshlahjeh Azar,
  • Abolghasem Sadeghi-Niaraki,
  • Soo-Mi Choi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2936896
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7
pp. 120857 – 120871

Abstract

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Paintings evoke certain emotions in the viewers. Colors, shape, texture, and many other factors affect the feeling conveyed by paintings, but colors seem to have a stronger effect due to a century-long study of color-emotion association in various fields of psychology, art, and color science. There are many color-emotion theories and most of them have been implemented, however, the Luscher Color Test is untouched amongst them. Based on several reasons, discussed in detail inside the paper, we believe this theory can cover problems in this domain of emotion extraction. The main motivation for choosing the Luscher test was that this method is designed for personality and mood analysis and it can better study abstract paintings. In this paper, a set of paintings from Iranian-Islamic cultural heritage is chosen as a dataset. We have proposed the L-EEP method based on Culture Technology (CT) concept to extract emotions from paintings with image processing techniques and psychology knowledge. This method extracts specific colors from paintings and by performing the Luscher test automatically, is able to determine eight emotions. For this matter, paintings are assessed in two moods: 1. The full extent of the painting 2. Cropped interest area of the painting that attracts more attention. Then, the color palette which is extracted colors ordered based on their coverage extent enters search engine. The search engine performs the searching process in the 3D knowledge base of Luscher color-emotion layers to extract relative values of emotions in both scenarios. For the evaluation of the results, three steps were taken. First, we compared the output results of ancient Persian painting with literature and text of their background stories. Then a viewer evaluation is done to compare the results with human viewpoint. Finally, a set of modern abstract paintings peer-rated in the IAPS standard system to further examine the proposed method. The results of the three forms of evaluation indicate the applicability of the L-EEP approach.

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