Image aesthetic assessment has always been regarded as a challenging task because of the variability of subjective preference. Besides, the assessment of a photo is also related to its style, semantic content, etc. Conventionally, the estimations of aesthetic score and style for
an image are treated as separate problems. In this paper, we explore the inter-relatedness between the aesthetics and image style, and design a neural network that can jointly categorize image by styles and give an aesthetic score distribution.
To this end, we propose a multi-task
network (MTNet) with an aesthetic column serving as a score predictor and a style column serving as a style classifier. The angular-softmax loss is applied in training primary style classifiers to maximize the margin among classes in single-label training data; the semi-supervised method is
applied to improve the network’s generalization ability iteratively. We combine the regression loss and classification loss in training aesthetic score. Experiments on the AVA dataset show the superiority of our network in both image attributes classification and aesthetic ranking tasks.
Anchoring effect in judgments of objective fact and subjective preference
