we aim to apply sparse autoencoder-based unsupervised feature learning to emotional semantic analysis for textile images. to tackle the problem of limited training data, we present a cross-domain feature learning scheme for emotional textile image classification using convolutional autoencoders. we further propose a correlation-analysis-based feature selection method for the weights learned by sparse autoencoders to reduce the number of features extracted from large size images. first, we randomly collect image patches on an unlabeled image dataset in the source domain and learn local features with a sparse autoencoder. we then conduct feature selection according to the correlation between different weight vectors corresponding to the autoencoder's hidden units. we finally adopt a convolutional neural network including a pooling layer to obtain global feature activations of textile images in the target domain and send these global feature vectors into logistic regression models for emotional image classification. the cross-domain unsupervised feature learning method achieves 65% to 78% average accuracy in the cross-validation experiments corresponding to eight emotional categories and performs better than conventional methods. feature selection can reduce the computational cost of global feature extraction by about 50% while improving classification performance. (c) 2017 spie and is&t