Deep convolutional neural networks have recently achieved great success on image aesthetics assessment task. In this paper, we propose an efficient method which takes the global, local and scene-aware information of images into consideration and exploits the composite features extracted from corresponding pretrained deep learning models to classify the derived features with support vector machine. Contrary to popular methods that require fine-tuning or training a new model from scratch, our training-free method directly takes the deep features generated by off-the-shelf models for image classification and scene recognition. Also, we analyzed the factors that could influence the performance from two aspects: the architecture of the deep neural network and the contribution of local and scene-aware information. It turns out that deep residual network could produce more aesthetics-aware image representation and composite features lead to the improvement of overall performance. Experiments on common large-scale aesthetics assessment benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art results in photo aesthetics assessment.
Methods in image aesthetics assessment could generally be divided into three distinct categories: classical handcrafted low-level features, generic features based on image descriptors, and the contemporary approach of utilizing deep learning models. @cite_12 proposed visual features based on standard photography and visual design rules to encapsulate aesthetic attributes from low-level image features. @cite_19 proposed to learn aesthetic attributes from textual comments on the photographs using generic image features. Recently, deep learning methods have been applied to image aesthetic assessment @cite_22 @cite_15 @cite_0 and have significantly improved the prediction precision against previous non-deep methods. @cite_16 proposed a query-dependent aesthetic model based on feature representation learned from CNN. @cite_2 proposed to adopt the generic features from the penultimate layer output of AlexNet with spatial pyramid pooling. @cite_9 proposed a CNN modified from AlexNet by stacking seven scene convolutional layers. @cite_22 proposed ILGNet derived from part of the GoogLeNet which contains Inception module.
@cite_22 @cite_9 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_12
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The ability to rank the images based on their appearance finds many real-world applications, such as image retrieval or image album creation. Despite the recent dominance of deep learning methods in computer vision which often result in superior performance, they are not always the methods of choice because they lack interpretability. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of improving the image aesthetic inference of the convolutional neural networks with hand-designed features that rely on domain expertise in various fields. We perform a comparison of hand-crafted feature sets in their ability to predict fine-grained aesthetics scores on two image aesthetics data sets. We observe that even feature sets published earlier are able to compete with more recently published algorithms and, by combining the algorithms, a significant improvement in predicting image aesthetics is possible. By using a tree-based learner, we perform the feature elimination to understand the best performing features overall and across different image categories. Only roughly 15 and 8 of the features are needed to achieve full performance in predicting a fine-grained aesthetic score and binary classification, respectively. By combining the hand-crafted features with metafeatures that predict the quality of an image based on convolutional neural network features, the model performs better than a baseline VGG16 model. One can, however, achieve more significant improvement in both aesthetics score prediction and binary classification by fusing the hand-crafted features and the penultimate layer activations. Our experiments indicate an improvement up to 2.2 achieving current state-of-the-art binary classification accuracy on the aesthetic visual analysis data set when the hand-designed features are fused with activations from VGG16 and ResNet50 networks. Photo aesthetics assessment is challenging. Deep convolutional neural network (ConvNet) methods have recently shown promising results for aesthetics assessment. The performance of these deep ConvNet methods, however, is often compromised by the constraint that the neural network only takes the fixed-size input. To accommodate this requirement, input images need to be transformed via cropping, scaling, or padding, which often damages image composition, reduces image resolution, or causes image distortion, thus compromising the aesthetics of the original images. In this paper, we present a composition-preserving deep Con-vNet method that directly learns aesthetics features from the original input images without any image transformations. Specifically, our method adds an adaptive spatial pooling layer upon the regular convolution and pooling layers to directly handle input images with original sizes and aspect ratios. To allow for multi-scale feature extraction, we develop the Multi-Net Adaptive Spatial Pooling ConvNet architecture which consists of multiple sub-networks with different adaptive spatial pooling sizes and leverage a scene–based aggregation layer to effectively combine the predictions from multiple sub-networks. Our experiments on the large-scale aesthetics assessment benchmark (AVA [29]) demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the state-of-the-art results in photo aesthetics assessment. In this paper we investigate the aesthetic image classification problem, also known as automatically classifying an image into low or high aesthetic quality, which is quite a challenging problem. Considering both the local and global information of images is quite important for image aesthetic quality assessment. Currently, a powerful inception module is proposed which shows very high performance in object classification. We have the observation that the inception module has the ability of considering both the local and global features in nature. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel DCNN structure codenamed ILGNet for image aesthetics classification, which introduces the Inception module and connects intermediate Local layers to the Global layer for the output. In addition, the ILGNet is derived from part of the GoogLeNet. Thus, we can easily use a pre-trained image classification GoogleLeNet model on the ImageNet dataset and fine tune our connected local and global layer on the large scale aesthetics assessment AVA dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed ILGNet outperforms the state of the art results in image aesthetics assessment in the AVA benchmark. The time cost of both training and test of the ILGNet are significantly less than those of full GoogLeNet with only a little reduction of the classification accuracy. Our ILGNet can achieve similar classification accuracy as that of 2 3 GoogLeNet, whose computational cost is nearly twice of ours. This makes the aesthetic assessment model more easily to be integrated into mobile and embedded systems. In this paper we propose a novel aesthetic model emphasizing psycho-visual statistics extracted from multiple levels in contrast to earlier approaches that rely only on descriptors suited for image recognition or based on photographic principles. At the lowest level, we determine dark-channel, sharpness and eye-sensitivity statistics over rectangular cells within a frame. At the next level, we extract Sentibank features (1,200 pre-trained visual classifiers) on a given frame, that invoke specific sentiments such as "colorful clouds", "smiling face" etc. and collect the classifier responses as frame-level statistics. At the topmost level, we extract trajectories from video shots. Using viewer's fixation priors, the trajectories are labeled as foreground, and background camera on which statistics are computed. Additionally, spatio-temporal local binary patterns are computed that capture texture variations in a given shot. Classifiers are trained on individual feature representations independently. On thorough evaluation of 9 different types of features, we select the best features from each level -- dark channel, affect and camera motion statistics. Next, corresponding classifier scores are integrated in a sophisticated low-rank fusion framework to improve the final prediction scores. Our approach demonstrates strong correlation with human prediction on 1,000 broadcast quality videos released by NHK as an aesthetic evaluation dataset. This article reviews recent computer vision techniques used in the assessment of image aesthetic quality. Image aesthetic assessment aims at computationally distinguishing high-quality from low-quality photos based on photographic rules, typically in the form of binary classification or quality scoring. A variety of approaches has been proposed in the literature to try to solve this challenging problem. In this article, we summarize these approaches based on visual feature types (hand-crafted features and deep features) and evaluation criteria (data set characteristics and evaluation metrics). The main contributions and novelties of the reviewed approaches are highlighted and discussed. In addition, following the emergence of deep-learning techniques, we systematically evaluate recent deep-learning settings that are useful for developing a robust deep model for aesthetic scoring. Effective visual features are essential for computational aesthetic quality rating systems. Existing methods used machine learning and statistical modeling techniques on handcrafted features or generic image descriptors. A recently-published large-scale dataset, the AVA dataset, has further empowered machine learning based approaches. We present the RAPID (RAting PIctorial aesthetics using Deep learning) system, which adopts a novel deep neural network approach to enable automatic feature learning. The central idea is to incorporate heterogeneous inputs generated from the image, which include a global view and a local view, and to unify the feature learning and classifier training using a double-column deep convolutional neural network. In addition, we utilize the style attributes of images to help improve the aesthetic quality categorization accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art on the AVA dataset. Photo quality assessment from the view of human aesthetics, which tries to classify images into the categories of good and bad, has drawn a lot of attention in computer vision field. Up to now, experts have proposed many methods to deal with this problem. Most of those methods are based on the design of hand-crafted features. However, due to the complexity and subjectivity of human’s aesthetic activities, it is difficult to describe and model all the factors that affect the photo aesthetic quality. Therefore those methods just obtain limited success. On the other hand, deep convolutional neural network has been proved to be effective in many computer vision problems and it does not need human efforts in the design of features. In this paper, we try to adopt a deep convolutional neural network that “understands” images well to conduct the photo aesthetic quality assessment. Firstly, we implement a deep convolutional neural network which has eight layers and millions of parameters. Then to “teach” this network enough knowledge about images, we train it on the ImageNet which is one of the largest available image database. Next, for each given image, we take the activations of the last layer of the neural network as its aesthetic feature. The experimental results on two large and reliable image aesthetic quality assessment datasets prove the effectiveness of our method. In this paper, we propose a new deep network that learns multi-level deep representations for image emotion classification (MldrNet). Image emotion can be recognized through image semantics, image aesthetics and low-level visual features from both global and local views. Existing image emotion classification works using hand-crafted features or deep features mainly focus on either low-level visual features or semantic-level image representations without taking all factors into consideration. The proposed MldrNet combines deep representations of different levels, i.e. image semantics, image aesthetics, and low-level visual features to effectively classify the emotion types of different kinds of images, such as abstract paintings and web images. Extensive experiments on both Internet images and abstract paintings demonstrate the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods using deep features or hand-crafted features. The proposed approach also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with at least 6 performance improvement in terms of overall classification accuracy. Automatically assessing photo quality from the perspective of visual aesthetics is of great interest in high-level vision research and has drawn much attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose content-based photo quality assessment using both regional and global features. Under this framework, subject areas, which draw the most attentions of human eyes, are first extracted. Then regional features extracted from both subject areas and background regions are combined with global features to assess photo quality. Since professional photographers adopt different photographic techniques and have different aesthetic criteria in mind when taking different types of photos (e.g., landscape versus portrait), we propose to segment subject areas and extract visual features in different ways according to the variety of photo content. We divide the photos into seven categories based on their visual content and develop a set of new subject area extraction methods and new visual features specially designed for different categories. The effectiveness of this framework is supported by extensive experimental comparisons of existing photo quality assessment approaches as well as our new features on different categories of photos. In addition, we propose an approach of online training an adaptive classifier to combine the proposed features according to the visual content of a test photo without knowing its category. Another contribution of this work is to construct a large and diversified benchmark dataset for the research of photo quality assessment. It includes 17,673 photos with manually labeled ground truth. This new benchmark dataset can be down loaded at http: mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk CUHKPQ Dataset.htm. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similar striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. Learning efficient image representations is at the core of the scene classification task of remote sensing imagery. The existing methods for solving the scene classification task, based on either feature coding approaches with low-level hand-engineered features or unsupervised feature learning, can only generate mid-level image features with limited representative ability, which essentially prevents them from achieving better performance. Recently, the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are hierarchical architectures trained on large-scale datasets, have shown astounding performance in object recognition and detection. However, it is still not clear how to use these deep convolutional neural networks for high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) scene classification. In this paper, we investigate how to transfer features from these successfully pre-trained CNNs for HRRS scene classification. We propose two scenarios for generating image features via extracting CNN features from different layers. In the first scenario, the activation vectors extracted from fully-connected layers are regarded as the final image features; in the second scenario, we extract dense features from the last convolutional layer at multiple scales and then encode the dense features into global image features through commonly used feature coding approaches. Extensive experiments on two public scene classification datasets demonstrate that the image features obtained by the two proposed scenarios, even with a simple linear classifier, can result in remarkable performance and improve the state-of-the-art by a significant margin. The results reveal that the features from pre-trained CNNs generalize well to HRRS datasets and are more expressive than the low- and mid-level features. Moreover, we tentatively combine features extracted from different CNN models for better performance. Current approaches to aesthetic image analysis either provide accurate or interpretable results. To get both accuracy and interpretability, we advocate the use of learned visual attributes as mid-level features. For this purpose, we propose to discover and learn the visual appearance of attributes automatically, using the recently introduced AVA database which contains more than 250,000 images together with their user ratings and textual comments. These learned attributes have many applications including aesthetic quality prediction, image classification and retrieval. Aesthetic image analysis is the study and assessment of the aesthetic properties of images. Current computational approaches to aesthetic image analysis either provide accurate or interpretable results. To obtain both accuracy and interpretability by humans, we advocate the use of learned and nameable visual attributes as mid-level features. For this purpose, we propose to discover and learn the visual appearance of attributes automatically, using a recently introduced database, called AVA, which contains more than 250,000 images together with their aesthetic scores and textual comments given by photography enthusiasts. We provide a detailed analysis of these annotations as well as the context in which they were given. We then describe how these three key components of AVA--images, scores, and comments--can be effectively leveraged to learn visual attributes. Lastly, we show that these learned attributes can be successfully used in three applications: aesthetic quality prediction, image tagging and retrieval. 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. Automatically assessing photo quality from the perspective of visual aesthetics is of great interest in high-level vision research and has drawn much attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose content-based photo quality assessment using regional and global features. Under this framework, subject areas, which draw the most attentions of human eyes, are first extracted. Then regional features extracted from subject areas and the background regions are combined with global features to assess the photo quality. Since professional photographers may adopt different photographic techniques and may have different aesthetic criteria in mind when taking different types of photos (e.g. landscape versus portrait), we propose to segment regions and extract visual features in different ways according to the categorization of photo content. Therefore we divide the photos into seven categories based on their content and develop a set of new subject area extraction methods and new visual features, which are specially designed for different categories. This argument is supported by extensive experimental comparisons of existing photo quality assessment approaches as well as our new regional and global features over different categories of photos. Our new features significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods. Another contribution of this work is to construct a large and diversified benchmark database for the research of photo quality assessment. It includes 17, 613 photos with manually labeled ground truth. 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”. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on deep neural networks for face sketch synthesis from a photo. Imitating the process of how artists draw sketches, our framework synthesizes face sketches in a cascaded manner. A content image is first generated that outlines the shape of the face and the key facial features. Textures and shadings are then added to enrich the details of the sketch. We utilize a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) to create the content image, and propose a style transfer approach to introduce textures and shadings based on a newly proposed pyramid column feature. We demonstrate that our style transfer approach based on the pyramid column feature can not only preserve more sketch details than the common style transfer method, but also surpasses traditional patch based methods. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations suggest that our framework outperforms other state-of-the-arts methods, and can also generalize well to different test images. Real-world applications could benefit from the ability to automatically generate a fine-grained ranking of photo aesthetics. However, previous methods for image aesthetics analysis have primarily focused on the coarse, binary categorization of images into high- or low-aesthetic categories. In this work, we propose to learn a deep convolutional neural network to rank photo aesthetics in which the relative ranking of photo aesthetics are directly modeled in the loss function. Our model incorporates joint learning of meaningful photographic attributes and image content information which can help regularize the complicated photo aesthetics rating problem. We assess the applicability of several popular learning methods for the problem of recognizing generic visual categories with invariance to pose, lighting, and surrounding clutter. A large dataset comprising stereo image pairs of 50 uniform-colored toys under 36 azimuths, 9 elevations, and 6 lighting conditions was collected (for a total of 194,400 individual images). The objects were 10 instances of 5 generic categories: four-legged animals, human figures, airplanes, trucks, and cars. Five instances of each category were used for training, and the other five for testing. Low-resolution grayscale images of the objects with various amounts of variability and surrounding clutter were used for training and testing. Nearest neighbor methods, support vector machines, and convolutional networks, operating on raw pixels or on PCA-derived features were tested. Test error rates for unseen object instances placed on uniform backgrounds were around 13 for SVM and 7 for convolutional nets. On a segmentation recognition task with highly cluttered images, SVM proved impractical, while convolutional nets yielded 16 7 error. A real-time version of the system was implemented that can detect and classify objects in natural scenes at around 10 frames per second.