Photo quality assessment with DCNN that understands image well

Abstract

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.