Slashdot Mirror
Computers With Opinions On Visual Aesthetics
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."
Oh great, now we'll turn our computer on in the morning, and it will say "I think this is far too early!" and switch itself back off.
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
I'am afraid I cannot do that Dave.
Isn't aesthetic value a hugely personal thing? I mean I looked at some of the photos on the site and the ratings were arse-backwards as far as I was concerned. Generic, boring and frankly badly composed images were getting ~95%, whereas others that I thought were truely exceptional were being ranked in the 50's.
I'm not saying "my opinion is better", just that it seems sort of pointless to assign a value to a picture like this.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
It's terrible. Awful. A hopeless system. I wouldn't use ever it.
And I'm not just saying that because it rated a couple of my photos as poor. :)
http://twitter.com/onion2k
This seems a little far-fetched considering the vagueness of someone liking a photo that another person doesn't. I can't imagine this on something like flickr. I guess this could be some standalone rating that people could use on stock photography sites, where buying something needs to have commercial appeal. Websites such as alamy.com tend to do these things manually, they probably might find some use for this.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
From the Acquine website "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? That rather neatly avoids validation or refutation of Acquine's results. This is suspicious and seems to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of its score in less obvious cases.
What exactly is a "color professional photograph"? Landscapes? Portraits? Group shots? Sports photography? Photo journalism? Abstracts? Artistic Nudes?
This may be an interesting programming toy but it has little to no use in the real world, unless you have a desire to locate generically boring pictures built to formula. (or, generically boring pictures that have been run through the "ALIPR Picture Score Optimizer" Photoshop filter)
It prefers a nazi germany flag over some beautiful landscapes and portraits
my name is godwin and I approve this message
This is great news, a system to tell us whether a photograph is beautiful or not. We are approaching the point where we can outsource all our thinking to computers. Soon we won't have to use our brains at all!
(Not that many of us do presently, anyway.)
Just google image search for any Pulitzer Prize winning photo and upload it to the Penn State ACQUINE system and see how some of them fare to the Goatse image...
The Iwo Jima flag raising photo at this URL gets a 26.1 in the system.
http://surreality.info/up/WW2_Iwo_Jima_flag_raising.jpg
The fucking Goatse image with a construction crane photoshopped into it (don't ask) just got an 84.1 on the same ACQUINE system....and no I'm not going to provide a URL just test it yourself.
So Goate is a better image than the Iwo Jima flag raising photo?
Am I missing something?
In other, unrelated news, Penn State researchers have released an online image voting system called 'Aesthetic or not' where users are presented with a random image and have to give it a score of between 0 and 100.
Initial user participation was good until for some completely unknown reason, 90% of images presented to users for rating were goatse, tubgirl, or other shock images.
Now I don't Have to look at so much porn to find the pics I want to look at.
That's not how Slashdot really works. Due to the number of astroturfers here, anything critical of Microsoft, no matter how true it is, is usually modded "Overrated", while "Vista works fine for me" gets "Informative".
One thing first. There *are* certain esthetic and technical rules / guidelines which are what we could call "objective" in the sense that they are very general. For example, a photograph usually looks better if the composition is balanced, if the 2/3rd (or golden mean) rule is used, the lines in the picture are coherent and lead the eye in the right direction (e.g. towards the subject), if the photograph is correctly exposed, colors matched etc. Of course, some of the greatest photographs break those rules; however, like in many things, you succeed in breaking the rules if you know what you are doing, and you cannot do it very often.
I can imagine that you can come up with an engine that is able to detect how "rule conformant" a given picture is.
However, pure formal esthetic judgement is what we rarely mean when talking about a "good photograph".
There is one main issue that will make it very hard to match our "overall" esthetic sense. Firstly, we are unable to detach the image contents from the "pure form". That means, if we see a worried women holding a child, we cannot just look at that as a composition. Also, we are always considering what we know about the subject. E.g. if we have a photograph of a man standing in water, if the photograph ends just below the place that his legs go into the water, we will have the impression that his legs are cut off, and that there is something wrong about the photograph. Finally, facial expression is immensely important for the perceived esthetics of a photograph.
I did some experimenting -- some of the truly great photographs of our times got rather lousy scores (e.g. Dorothea Lange's famous photograph, but also some color photographs as well), while at the same time rather random shots I did of my sons got even five out of five stars. Well. Maybe it will still be useful to someone to filter out the worse photographs.
j.
The field of AI is not comprised of a majority of researchers frantically trying to build an expert system that can pass a Turing Test. Visual data is complicated and building a system that can take that information and make use it in a very simplistic manner is non-trivial. Read some of scientific papers published by the authors of Acquine, and you'll see that their methodology (image processing, regression, Bayes' classification, decision trees, support vector machines, classification and regression trees, to name but a few) is anything but trivial.
Not only did they build something novel, but they built a system that does a good job of approximating human response to good/bad photography.
If you want to contest the true novelty of their work, through an academically-inspired claim that they combined existing technologies in a way that isn't terribly novel, rather than creating their own technology, then that's fine. However, the blanket statement that some researchers are trying to do "real work" and that Acquine isn't real work, is a giant red-flag indicating that you likely haven't got the slightest clue what actually goes on in the field of AI. Typically researchers like to tackle problems where the utility of their solutions isn't immediately obvious, the previous link to the RoboCup competition is a perfect example; who cares if you can build a robot that can play soccer? By your reasoning, that would be an incredible waste of time. Except, it's becoming the standard problem for multi-robotic systems research, and a large number of AI researchers are devoting significant time towards building RoboCup teams.
Why?
Simple, pick a real world task for a group of robots that "matters". Now decompose that task into all the subproblems that you would need to solve in order to have a robot complete the main task. Chances are, you're going to run into problems involving self-localization, team-work/cooperation, vision, data fusion, etc... All of those subproblems are being worked on and solved in different ways by researchers in the RoboCup challenge. And chances are, if you choose the methodologies used by the teams that win games you're likely to have chosen the most effective methodologies available in the field.
The true value of research isn't the end-product of each individual research-project. It's the end-product of many "useless" research-projects combined.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Do you find that it "does a good job of approximating human response"? Because I don't. Photos that are absolute crap get 99.99% and interesting photos get 1%. It seems completely random, except for its apparent preference for high resolution and black borders.
I wonder how this AI will react to goatse? Will it have a human response?
C|N>K
So I follow the link and think, hey this is pretty cool. I grab some screen shots of my apps and run them through. Unsurprisingly, some old VB6 crap I'm still maintaining was scoring in the 5-10% range. The newer Web and Silverlight apps I've been working on are all over from 30%-70%. I'm thinking this software is pretty cool and we could use it to get rapid feedback on different layouts and styles.
So I send the link to one of my co-workers. He brings it up and posts a screen shot of his web site. We start talking about how we could use it and how it works. And we wind up with a little impromptu meeting at his cubicle. 5 people huddled around his desk checking out the rating system.
And then we hit the home page, were recent highly rated photo thumbnails are shown. And what do we see?
Some lady, buck naked, leaning on her shoulder blades, twisted up like a pretzel shooting an anal douche fountain a few feet into the air.
And that is why you never trust a machine to rate user submitted images.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs