High level describable attributes for predicting aesthetics and interestingness

With the rise in popularity of digital cameras, the amount of visual data available on the web is growing exponentially. Some of these pictures are extremely beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, but the vast majority are uninteresting or of low quality. This paper demonstrates a simple, yet powerful method to automatically select high aesthetic quality images from large image collections. Our aesthetic quality estimation method explicitly predicts some of the possible image cues that a human might use to evaluate an image and then uses them in a discriminative approach. These cues or high level describable image attributes fall into three broad types: 1) compositional attributes related to image layout or configuration, 2) content attributes related to the objects or scene types depicted, and 3) sky-illumination attributes related to the natural lighting conditions. We demonstrate that an aesthetics classifier trained on these describable attributes can provide a significant improvement over baseline methods for predicting human quality judgments. We also demonstrate our method for predicting the “interestingness” of Flickr photos, and introduce a novel problem of estimating query specific “interestingness”.