Mining Exoticism from Visual Content with Fusion-based Deep Neural Networks

Exoticism is the charm of the unfamiliar, it often means unusual, mystery, and it can evoke the atmosphere of remote lands. Although it has received interest in different arts, like painting and music, no study has been conducted on understanding exoticism from a computational perspective. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to explore the problem of exoticism-aware image classification , aiming at automatically measuring the amount of exoticism in images and investigating the significant aspects of the task. The estimation of image exoticism could be applied in fields like advertising and travel suggestion, as well as to increase serendipity and diversity of recommendations and search results. We propose a Fusion-based Deep Neural Network (FDNN) for this task, which combines image representations learned by Deep Neural Networks with visual and semantic hand-crafted features. Comparisons with other Machine Learning models show that our proposed architecture is the best performing one, reaching accuracy over 83% and 91% on two different datasets. Moreover, experiments with classifiers exploiting both visual and semantic features allow to analyze what are the most important aspects for identifying exotic content. Ground truth has been gathered by retrieving exotic and not exotic images through a web search engine by posing queries with exotic and not exotic semantics, and then assessing the exoticism of the retrieved images via a crowdsourcing evaluation. The dataset is publicly released to promote advances in this novel field.