Please watch the pre-recorded talk on SlidesLive.

Abstract: Image aesthetics has become an important criterion for visual content curation on social media sites and media content repositories. Previous work on aesthetic prediction models in the computer vision community has focused on aesthetic score prediction or binary image labeling. However, raw aesthetic annotations are in the form of score histograms and provide richer and more precise information than binary labels or mean scores. In this talk I will present recent work at NAVER LABS Europe on the rarely-studied problem of predicting aesthetic score distributions. The talk will cover the large-scale dataset we collected for this problem, called AVA, and will describe the novel deep architecture and training procedure for our score distribution model. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on AVA for three tasks: (i) aesthetic quality classification; (ii) aesthetic score regression; and (iii) aesthetic score distribution prediction, all while using one model trained only for the distribution prediction task. I will also discuss our proposed method for modifying an image such that its predicted aesthetics changes, and describe how this modification can be used to gain insight into our model.