Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

8 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Computers with opinions?! by Seriousity · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Computers with opinions?! by RogueyWon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh, this takes me back to something that happened when I was still at school, around about 1996 or so.

      At the time, despite being pretty much clueless by slashdot standards, I functioned (and still do function, when I can't avoid it) as the all purpose IT helpdesk for my family.

      Now, I have an aunt who was working as a manager in a medium sized UK based IT firm (I can't remember the name and I don't even think they're still around). However, do not take this as any indication that she knew anything at all about computers. She didn't. Nor did she have any inclination to learn. She could just about manage to use Microsoft Office and the web/e-mail clients that were around at the time (I think this was around the time of Netscape 2). Literally anything beyond that would baffle her. She'd call her monitor "the computer" and so on. She was employed, I gather, for her "management skills".

      Now, even at the time, I had a feeling that this was a crock. My aunt is a rather forceful personality. A less diplomatic person might use more bovine terminology and I always got the impression that she wouldn't be much fun to work for.

      She's also very, very, very large (over 25 stone) and ugly as sin to boot. That's not me being deliberately rude. There's just no nicer way to put it without doing a genuine dis-service to the truth.

      Anyway, one Saturday afternoon, I get a call from her. Her voice implies that she's perched in that dangerous territory between bursting into tears and throwing a screaming, PC-destroying fit. Apparently, her computer is "insulting" her. I need to go over there instantly. I got a lot of this kind of stuff until, a couple of years later, I finally told her where she could stick it after I moved off to university and got a call asking me to travel 200 miles to fix something. Anyway, I'm not best pleased about losing a Saturday afternoon, especially with exams coming up, but for the sake of a quiet life, I head over.

      Oh boy was it ever worth it.

      Sure enough, every two minutes on the dot, her PC is insulting her. Whatever she's doing in Windows, a little dialogue box will pop up with a splendidly vicious insult. I mean, some these were absolute gems and were clearly aimed right at her personally. A few of the more repeatable examples (and I still remember these more than a decade later) were:

      "Careful! Better fetch an extra chair. I think those two are about to give way."
      "Wow you must be constipated. Or does your face just look like that normally?"
      "Did you just fart, or do you always smell like that?"
      "Wipe your face. Half your lunch is stuck between your fifth and sixth chins."
      "Is that your face or your arse I can see? Your face? Hmm... the arse might be better."
      "I can access over 64,000,000 images via the Internet and none of them are as ugly as you."
      "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? No? How about a half-digested turnip?"

      There was plenty of other stuff as well, including the old classics about ID10T and PEBCAK errors, but enough of it was specific enough to my aunt (making mention of particularly distinctive unflattering features) that this was clearly something bespoke.

      Anyway, my aunt's in an absolute state at this point. She's convinced that the computer is insulting her. She tells me she tried covering up the monitor for half an hour (so it couldn't see her), but when she came back, it had been queuing up the insults.

      Anyway, having confirmed that a virus scanner doesn't pick anything up, I ask to see any disks she's put in the PC lately, or any files she's downloaded. The downloaded files all look pretty safe, and it doesn't seem like anything dodgy's come in via e-mail either. However, she then shows me a couple of disks (3.5" floppies) she'd brought home with work on. These are a numbered series of progress reports. Most of the disks look absolutely fine - a few Word and Excel files. Nothing too scary (I don't think MS Office files were being used extensively for exploits at the time).

      However, on the fi

  2. Acquine may assign funny scores... by marmusa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. terrible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It prefers a nazi germany flag over some beautiful landscapes and portraits

    my name is godwin and I approve this message

  4. Pulitzer versus Goatse.... by VinylRecords · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:Pulitzer versus Goatse.... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So Goate is a better image than the Iwo Jima flag raising photo?

      Maybe all the people sending goatse to it has biased its aesthetic judgement.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    2. Re:Pulitzer versus Goatse.... by DerCed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How on earth should an algorithm know how to infer the symbolic value of the flag rising image?! As far as I understand the Pulitzer Prize is not about artistic and aesthetic value, but rather about journalistic impact, isn't it?

  5. Re:My lone opinion by Morphine007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!