Image Aesthetics Prediction Using Multiple Patches Preserving the Original Aspect Ratio of Contents

The spread of social networking services has created an increasing demand for selecting, editing, and generating impressive images. This trend increases the importance of evaluating image aesthetics as a complementary function of automatic image processing. We propose a multi-patch method, named MPA-Net (Multi-Patch Aggregation Network), to predict image aesthetics scores by maintaining the original aspect ratios of contents in the images. Through an experiment involving the large-scale AVA dataset, which contains 250,000 images, we show that the effectiveness of the equal-interval multi-patch selection approach for aesthetics score prediction is significant compared to the single-patch prediction and random patch selection approaches. For this dataset, MPA-Net outperforms the neural image assessment algorithm, which was regarded as a baseline method. In particular, MPA-Net yields a 0.073 (11.5%) higher linear correlation coefficient (LCC) of aesthetics scores and a 0.088 (14.4%) higher Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC). MPA-Net also reduces the mean square error (MSE) by 0.0115 (4.18%) and achieves results for the LCC and SRCC that are comparable to those of the state-of-the-art continuous aesthetics score prediction methods. Most notably, MPA-Net yields a significant lower MSE especially for images with aspect ratios far from 1.0, indicating that MPA-Net is useful for a wide range of image aspect ratios. MPA-Net uses only images and does not require external information during the training nor prediction stages. Therefore, MPA-Net has great potential for applications aside from aesthetics score prediction such as other human subjectivity prediction.