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Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Demographically Oriented Analysis of Aesthetics in Photographs

Published: 25 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Aesthetics is a subjective concept that is likely to be perceived differently among people of different ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds. While techniques that directly compute this concept in images has seen increasing attention by the multimedia and machine-learning community, there are very few attempts at encoding the influences from the photographer’s viewpoint. This work demonstrates how the aesthetic quality of photos can be better learned by accounting for the demographic background of a photographer. A new AVA-PD (Photographer Demographic) dataset is created to supplement the AVA dataset by providing photographers’ age, gender and location attributes. Two deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures are proposed to utilize demographic information for aesthetic prediction of photos; both are shown to yield better prediction capabilities compared to most existing approaches. By leveraging on AVA-PD meta-data, we also present some additional machine-learnable tasks such as identifying the photographer and predicting photography styles from a person’s gallery of photos.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Improving Image Aesthetic Assessment via Multiple Image Joint LearningACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/368712820:11(1-24)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Aesthetic Attribute Assessment of Images Numerically on Mixed Multi-attribute DatasetsACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/354714418:3s(1-16)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2023
  • (2023)ReferencesAesthetics in Digital Photography10.1002/9781394225972.refs(271-294)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 15, Issue 2s
Special Section on Cross-Media Analysis for Visual Question Answering, Special Section on Big Data, Machine Learning and AI Technologies for Art and Design and Special Section on MMSys/NOSSDAV 2018
April 2019
381 pages
ISSN:1551-6857
EISSN:1551-6865
DOI:10.1145/3343360
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 July 2019
Accepted: 01 April 2019
Revised: 01 February 2019
Received: 01 July 2018
Published in TOMM Volume 15, Issue 2s

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Author Tags

  1. AVA
  2. Photographer demographics
  3. convolutional neural networks
  4. demographic attributes
  5. image aesthetic evaluation

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • MMU-GRA Scheme, Multimedia University
  • Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Improving Image Aesthetic Assessment via Multiple Image Joint LearningACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/368712820:11(1-24)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Aesthetic Attribute Assessment of Images Numerically on Mixed Multi-attribute DatasetsACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/354714418:3s(1-16)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2023
  • (2023)ReferencesAesthetics in Digital Photography10.1002/9781394225972.refs(271-294)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Swipes and Saves: A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Aesthetic Assessments and Perceived Beauty of Mobile Phone PhotographsFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2022.78697713Online publication date: 28-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Assessing the Visual Esthetics of User Interfaces: A Ten-Year Systematic MappingInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2021.192611838:2(144-164)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2021
  • (2021)Advances and Challenges in Computational Image AestheticsHuman Perception of Visual Information10.1007/978-3-030-81465-6_6(133-181)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Learning Image Aesthetics by Learning Inpainting2020 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)10.1109/ICIP40778.2020.9191130(2246-2250)Online publication date: Oct-2020
  • (2020)ReferencesComputational Models for Cognitive Vision10.1002/9781119527886.refs(187-213)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2020

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