A toolbox for calculating objective image properties in aesthetics research

Over the past two decades, researchers in the field of visual aesthetics have studied numerous quantitative (objective) image properties and how they relate to visual aesthetic appreciation. However, results are difficult to compare between research groups. One reason is that researchers use different sets of image properties in their studies. But even if the same properties are used, the image pre-processing techniques may differ and often researchers use their own customized scripts to calculate the image properties. To provide greater accessibility and comparability of research results in visual experimental aesthetics, we developed an open-access and easy-to-use toolbox (called the 'Aesthetics Toolbox'). The Toolbox allows users to calculate a well-defined set of quantitative image properties popular in contemporary research. The properties include lightness and color statistics, Fourier spectral properties, fractality, self-similarity, symmetry, as well as different entropy measures and CNN-based variances. Compatible with most devices, the Toolbox provides an intuitive click-and-drop web interface. In the Toolbox, we integrated the original scripts of four different research groups and translated them into Python 3. To ensure that results were consistent across analyses, we took care that results from the Python versions of the scripts were the same as those from the original scripts. The toolbox, detailed documentation, and a link to the cloud version are available via Github: https://github.com/RBartho/Aesthetics-Toolbox. In summary, we developed a toolbox that helps to standardize and simplify the calculation of quantitative image properties for visual aesthetics research.

Predicting beauty, liking, and aesthetic quality: A comparative analysis of image databases for visual aesthetics research

In the fields of Experimental and Computational Aesthetics, numerous image datasets have been created over the last two decades. In the present work, we provide a comparative overview of twelve image datasets that include aesthetic ratings (beauty, liking or aesthetic quality) and investigate the reproducibility of results across different datasets. Specifically, we examine how consistently the ratings can be predicted by using either (A) a set of 20 previously studied statistical image properties, or (B) the layers of a convolutional neural network developed for object recognition. Our findings reveal substantial variation in the predictability of aesthetic ratings across the different datasets. However, consistent similarities were found for datasets containing either photographs or paintings, suggesting different relevant features in the aesthetic evaluation of these two image genres. To our surprise, statistical image properties and the convolutional neural network predict aesthetic ratings with similar accuracy, highlighting a significant overlap in the image information captured by the two methods. Nevertheless, the discrepancies between the datasets call into question the generalizability of previous research findings on single datasets. Our study underscores the importance of considering multiple datasets to improve the validity and generalizability of research results in the fields of experimental and computational aesthetics.