Image Aesthetics Assessment Based on Multi-stream CNN Architecture and Saliency Features

In this paper, we explore how higher-level perceptual information based on visual attention can be used for aesthetic assessment of images. We assume that visually dominant subjects in a photograph influence stronger aesthetic interest. In other words, visual attention may be a key to predicting photographic aesthetics. Our proposed aesthetic assessment method, which is based on multi-stream and multi-task convolutional neural networks (CNNs), extracts global features and saliency features from an input image. These provide higher-level visual information such as the quality of the photo subject and the subject–background relationship. Results from our experiments support the effectiveness of our approach.