Judging a Movie by its Poster using Deep Learning

It is often the case that a human can determine the genre of a movie by looking at its movie poster. This task is not trivial for computers. A recent advance in machine learning called deep learning allows algorithms to learn important features from large datasets. Rather than analyzing an image pixel by pixel, for example, higher level features can be used for classification. In this project I attempted to train a neural network of stacked autoencoders to predict a movie’s genre given an image of its movie poster. My hypothesis is that a good algorithm can correctly guess the genre based on the movie poster at least half the time.