A Survey of Hand Crafted and Deep Learning Methods for Image Aesthetic Assessment

Automatic image aesthetics assessment is a computer vision problem that deals with the categorization of images into different aesthetic levels. The categorization is usually done by analyzing an input image and computing some measure of the degree to which the image adhere to the key principles of photography (balance, rhythm, harmony, contrast, unity, look, feel, tone and texture). Owing to its diverse applications in many areas, automatic image aesthetic assessment has gained significant research attention in recent years. This paper presents a literature review of the recent techniques of automatic image aesthetics assessment. A large number of traditional hand crafted and deep learning based approaches are reviewed. Key problem aspects are discussed such as why some features or models perform better than others and what are the limitations. A comparison of the quantitative results of different methods is also provided at the end.