The evolution and the development of “kansei” keywords

The word kansei originally means sensitivity in Japanese. A somewhat different and expanded meaning of this word began to be used in Japan, at first in the area of marketing, in 1984. Gradually it had been used in various fields, and eventually became a buzzword of the 1980s. Kansei is an intentionally ambiguous word, meaning some ambiguous and illogical way of accepting sensible objects, something like feeling, sensitivity, and impression in English. In 1990s, the concept of kansei was introduced to information retrieval research. Experiments with kansei keywords consisting of adjectives, have been carried out for the retrieval of pictures and music. Normally steps of constructing and retrieving a kansei database are as follows: (1) to assign kansei keywords to images manually; (2) to relate the kansei keywords thus assigned with the characteristics (ex. color) extracted from the images; (3) to create a database consisting of images, their characteristics and kansei keywords; (4) to retrieve images with kansei keywords. Many experiments have shown that such a method of creating databases achieves the optimal performance in small size databases. Thus, it will be most probable that it cannot be applied to operational databases.