Relationship Between Visual Complexity and Aesthetics: Application to Beauty Prediction of Photos

Automatic evaluation of visual content by its aesthetic merit is becoming exceedingly important as the available volume of such content is expanding rapidly. Complexity is believed to be an important indicator of aesthetic assessment and widely used. However, psychological theories concerning complexity are only verified on limited situations, and the relationship between complexity and aesthetic experience on extensive scope of application is not yet clear. To this end, we designed an experiment to test human perception on the complexity of various photos. Then we propose a set of visual complexity features and show that the complexity level calculated from the proposed features have a near-monotonic relationship with human beings’ beauty expectation on thousands of photos. Further applications on beauty predication and quality assessment demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.