Composition-Preserving Deep Photo Aesthetics Assessment

Long Mai, Hailin Jin, Feng Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 497-506

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 ConvNet 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) demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the state-of-the-art results in photo aesthetics assessment.