Probabilistic Modeling of Image Aesthetic Assessment Toward Measuring Subjectivity

Assessing image aesthetics is a challenging computer vision task. One reason is that aesthetic preference is highly subjective and may vary significantly among people for certain images. Thus, it is important to properly model and quantify such subjectivity, but there has not been much effort to resolve this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic framework that can model and quantify subjective aesthetic preference based on the subjective logic. In this framework, the rating distribution is modeled as a beta distribution, from which the probabilities of being definitely pleasing, being definitely unpleasing, and being uncertain can be obtained. We use the probability of being uncertain to define an intuitive metric of subjectivity. Furthermore, we present a method to learn deep neural networks for prediction of image aesthetics, which is shown to be effective in improving the performance of subjectivity prediction via experiments.