Rethinking Image Aesthetics Assessment: Models, Datasets and Benchmarks

Challenges in image aesthetics assessment (IAA) arise from that images of different themes correspond to different evaluation criteria, and learning aesthetics directly from images while ignoring the impact of theme variations on human visual perception inhibits the further development of IAA; however, existing IAA datasets and models overlook this problem. To address this issue, we show that a theme-oriented dataset and model design are effective for IAA. Specifically, 1) we elaborately build a novel dataset, called TAD66K, that contains 66K images covering 47 popular themes, and each image is densely annotated by more than 1200 people with dedicated theme evaluation criteria. 2) We develop a baseline model, TANet, which can effectively extract theme information and adaptively establish perception rules to evaluate images with different themes. 3) We develop a large-scale benchmark (the most comprehensive thus far) by comparing 17 methods with TANet on three representative datasets: AVA, FLICKR-AES and the proposed TAD66K, TANet achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets. Our work offers the community an opportunity to explore more challenging directions; the code, dataset and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/woshidandan/TANet.