ArtEmis is a large-scale dataset aimed at providing a detailed understanding of the interplay between visual content, its emotional effect, and explanations for the latter in language. In contrast to most existing annotation datasets in computer vision, this dataset focuses on the affective experience triggered by visual artworks an the annotators were asked to indicate the dominant emotion they feel for a given image and, crucially, to also provide a grounded verbal explanation for their emotion choice. This leads to a rich set of signals for both the objective content and the affective impact of an image, creating associations with abstract concepts (e.g., “freedom” or “love”), or references that go beyond what is directly visible, including visual similes and metaphors, or subjective references to personal experiences.

This dataset focuses on visual art (e.g., paintings, artistic photographs) as it is a prime example of imagery created to elicit emotional responses from its viewers. ArtEmis contains 439K emotion attributions and explanations from humans, on 81K artworks from WikiArt.

Paper: ArtEmis: Affective Language for Visual Art