With the rapid expansion of the Electric Sport Utility Vehicle (ESUV) market, capturing consumer aesthetic preferences and emotional needs through front-end styling has become a key issue in automotive design. However, traditional Kansei Engineering (KE) approaches suffer from limited timeliness, subjectivity, and low predictive accuracy when extracting affective vocabulary and modeling the nonlinear relationship between product form and Kansei imagery. To address these challenges, this study proposes an improved KE-based ESUV styling framework that integrates data mining, machine learning, and generative AI. First, real consumer reviews and front-end styling samples are collected via Python-based web scraping. Next, the Biterm Topic Model (BTM) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are used to extract representative Kansei vocabulary. Subsequently, the Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) models are constructed and optimized using the Seagull Optimization Algorithm (SOA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Experimental results show that SOA-BPNN achieves superior predictive accuracy. Finally, Stable Diffusion is applied to generate ESUV design schemes, and the optimal model is employed to evaluate their Kansei imagery. The proposed framework offers a systematic and data-driven approach for predicting consumer affective responses in the conceptual styling stage, effectively addressing the limitations of conventional experience-based design. Thus, this study offers both methodological innovation and practical guidance for integrating affective modeling into ESUV styling design.

Fine-grained feature extraction and affective semantic mapping remain significant challenges in product form analysis. To address these issues, this study proposes a contrastive learning-based cross-modal fusion approach for product form imagery recognition, using the front-end design of new energy vehicles (NEVs) as a case study. The proposed method first employs the Biterm Topic Model (BTM) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to extract thematic patterns and compute weight distributions from consumer review texts, thereby identifying key imagery style labels. These labels are then leveraged for image annotation, facilitating the construction of a multimodal dataset. Next, ResNet-50 and Transformer architectures serve as the image and text encoders, respectively, to extract and represent multimodal features. To ensure effective alignment and deep fusion of textual and visual representations in a shared embedding space, a contrastive learning mechanism is introduced, optimizing cosine similarity between positive and negative sample pairs. Finally, a fully connected multilayer network is integrated at the output of the Transformer and ResNet with Contrastive Learning (TRCL) model to enhance classification accuracy and reliability. Comparative experiments against various deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) demonstrate that the TRCL model effectively integrates semantic and visual information, significantly improving the accuracy and robustness of complex product form imagery recognition. These findings suggest that the proposed method holds substantial potential for large-scale product appearance evaluation and affective cognition research. Moreover, this data-driven fusion underpins sustainable product form design by streamlining evaluation and optimizing resource use.