Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality

Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality
Penn State Live (05/05/09) Spinelle, Jenna; Messer, Andrea

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating system helps establish the foundation for determining how people will react emotionally to a visual image. ACQUINE delivers ratings--from zero to 100--within seconds, based on visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution, and photo composition. PSU researchers hope to improve upon the system's current performance level of more than 80 percent consistency between human and computer ratings. "Furthermore, aesthetics represents just one dimension of human emotion," says PSU professor James Z. Wang. "Future systems will perhaps strive to capture other emotions that pictures arouse in people." Wang says that linking cameras to ACQUINE could potentially enable a photographer to instantly see how the public might perceive a photo.

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