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Computers With Opinions On Visual Aesthetics

Posted by timothy on from the artificial-fastidiousness dept.

photoenthusiast writes "Penn State researchers launched a new online photo-rating system, code named Acquine (Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine), for automatically determining the aesthetic value of a photo. Users can upload their own photographs for an instant Acquine rating, a score from zero to 100. The system learns to associate extracted visual characteristics with the way humans rate photos based on a lot of previously-rated photographs. It is designed for color natural photographic pictures. Technical publications reveal how Acquine works."

2 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rubbish. by Nursie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It rated one of the best pictures I've ever taken as 13. Then it rated a fairly generic cityscape at around 60.

    I think it has some learning to do.

  2. Re:Acquine may assign funny scores... by mangu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "A rule of thumb is that if the aesthetic quality of a photo is obvious to most people, it may not be worthwhile to seek Acquine's opinion on it because Acquine may assign funny scores in such cases." So in cases where the correct score is obvious, Acquine's score can't be trusted?

    I noticed this with a picture I took in France that everybody praises. It got 6.9. I did the smallest possible change in color, darkening it imperceptibly. The new version got 35.7. Doing a selective gaussian blur also tends to raise the result a lot.

    My rating of their algorithm is 0.01 star, which can be summarized as "it sucks".