Online painting image clustering for the mental health of college art students based on improved CNN and SMOTE

In modern education, mental health problems have become the focus and difficulty of students’ education. Painting therapy has been integrated into the school’s art education as an effective mental health intervention. Deep learning can automatically learn the image features and abstract the low-level image features into high-level features. However, traditional image classification models are prone to lose background information, resulting in poor adaptability of the classification model. Therefore, this article extracts the lost colour of painting images based on K-means clustering and proposes a painting style classification model based on an improved convolutional neural network (CNN), where a modified Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is proposed to amplify the data. Then, the CNN network structure is optimized by adjusting the network’s vertical depth and horizontal width. Finally, a new activation function, PPReLU, is proposed to suppress the excessive value of the positive part. The experimental results show that the proposed model has the highest accuracy in classifying painting image styles by comparing it with state-of-the-art methods, whose accuracy is up to 91.55%, which is 8.7% higher than that of traditional CNN.