A Genetic Algorithm to Combine Deep Features for the Aesthetic Assessment of Images Containing Faces

Abstract

The automatic assessment of the aesthetic quality of a photo is a challenging and extensively studied problem. Most of the existing works focus on the aesthetic quality assessment of photos regardless of the depicted subject and mainly use features extracted from the entire image. It has been observed that the performance of generic content aesthetic assessment methods significantly decreases when it comes to images depicting faces. This paper introduces a method for evaluating the aesthetic quality of images with faces by encoding both the properties of the entire image and specific aspects of the face. Three different convolutional neural networks are exploited to encode information regarding perceptual quality, global image aesthetics, and facial attributes; then, a model is trained to combine these features to explicitly predict the aesthetics of images containing faces. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods for both binary, i.e., low/high, and continuous aesthetic score prediction on four different image databases in the state-of-the-art.