A novel architecture: Using convolutional neural networks for Kansei attributes automatic evaluation and labeling

Abstract Kansei evaluation is crucial to the process of Kansei engineering. However, traditional methods are subjective and random. In order to eliminate the differences of individual evaluation criteria in product Kansei attributes evaluation, and further improve the evaluation efficiency, a novel automatic evaluation and labeling architecture for product Kansei attributes was proposed in this paper based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The architecture consists of two modules: (1) Target detection module (Faster R-CNN was taken as an example), (2) Fine-Grained classification module (DFL-CNN was taken as an example). A case study was provided to validate the proposed architecture. The proposed architecture transformed design evaluation tasks into the recognition and classification tasks. The experiments achieved 98.837%, 96.899%, 86.047%, and 81.008% accuracy in the binary, triple, and two five-classification tasks, respectively. Our results proved the feasibility of using computer vision to mimic human vision for the automatic evaluation of Kansei attributes.