*Article* **Discovering Sentimental Interaction via Graph Convolutional Network for Visual Sentiment Prediction**

**Lifang Wu, Heng Zhang, Sinuo Deng, Ge Shi \* and Xu Liu**

> Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China; lfwu@bjut.edu.cn (L.W.); zhangheng2018@emails.bjut.edu.cn (H.Z.); dsn0w@emails.bjut.edu.cn (S.D.); liuxu91@bjut.edu.cn (X.L.)

**\*** Correspondence: tinkersxy@gmail.com

**Abstract:** With the popularity of online opinion expressing, automatic sentiment analysis of images has gained considerable attention. Most methods focus on effectively extracting the sentimental features of images, such as enhancing local features through saliency detection or instance segmentation tools. However, as a high-level abstraction, the sentiment is difficult to accurately capture with the visual element because of the "affective gap". Previous works have overlooked the contribution of the interaction among objects to the image sentiment. We aim to utilize interactive characteristics of objects in the sentimental space, inspired by human sentimental principles that each object contributes to the sentiment. To achieve this goal, we propose a framework to leverage the sentimental interaction characteristic based on a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). We first utilize an off-the-shelf tool to recognize objects and build a graph over them. Visual features represent nodes, and the emotional distances between objects act as edges. Then, we employ GCNs to obtain the interaction features among objects, which are fused with the CNN output of the whole image to predict the final results. Experimental results show that our method exceeds the state-of-the-art algorithm. Demonstrating that the rational use of interaction features can improve performance for sentiment analysis.

**Keywords:** visual sentiment analysis; sentiment classification; convolutional neural networks; graph convolutional networks
