Inferring Visual Persuasion via Body Language, Setting, and Deep Features

The computer vision community has reached a point when it can start considering high-level reasoning tasks such as the "communicative intents" of images, or in what light an image portrays its subject. For example, an image might imply that a politician is competent, trustworthy, or energetic. We explore a variety of features for predicting these communicative intents. We study a number of facial expressions and body poses as cues for the implied nuances of the politician's personality. We also examine how the setting of an image (e.g. kitchen or hospital) influences the audience's perception of the portrayed politician. Finally, we improve the performance of an existing approach on this problem, by learning intermediate cues using convolutional neural networks. We show state of the art results on the Visual Persuasion dataset of Joo et al. [11].