Distribution-oriented aesthetics assessment with semantic-aware hybrid network

Image aesthetics assessment has emerged as a hot topic in recent years due to its potential in numerous high-level vision applications. In this paper, distinguished from existing studies relying on a single label, we propose quantifying image aesthetics by a distribution over multiple quality levels. The distribution-based representation characterizes the disagreement among users' aesthetic preferences regarding the same image, and is also compatible with the traditional task of aesthetic label prediction. Our framework is developed based on fully convolutional networks and enables inputs of varying sizes. In this way, we circumvent the fixed-size constraint of prevalent convolutional neural networks, and avoid the risk of impairing the intrinsic aesthetic appeal of images. Moreover, given the fact that aesthetic perceiving is coupled with semantic understanding, we present a novel semantic-aware hybrid NEtwork (SANE), which harvests the information from object categorization and scene recognition to enhance image aesthetics assessment. Experiments on two benchmark datasets have well verified the effectiveness of our approach in both scenarios of aesthetic distribution prediction and aesthetic label prediction, and highlighted the benefits of input preserving as well as semantic understanding for images.