  Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers.
Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the
explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated
to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will
comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades,
especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main
challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and
absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models
that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets
for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and
dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on
(1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features,
(2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion
prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few
labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges
and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and
context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
