Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author. Pingjian Zhang, School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China. E-mail: pjzhang@scut.edu.cn.
Abstract: Computational aesthetics, which uses computers to learn human aesthetic habits and ultimately replace humans in scoring images, has become a hot topic in recent years due to its wide application. Most of the initial research is to manually extract features and use classifiers such as support vector machines to score images. With the development of deep learning, traditional manual feature extraction methods are gradually replaced by convolutional neural networks to extract more comprehensive features. However, it is a huge challenge to artificially design an aesthetic neural network. Recently, Neural Architecture Search has upsurged to find suitable neural networks for many tasks in deep learning. In this paper, we first attempt to combine Neural Architecture Search with computational aesthetics. We design and apply a customized progressive differentiable architecture search strategy to obtain a light-weighted and efficient aesthetic baseline model. In addition, we simulate the multi-person rating mechanism by outputting the distribution of the aesthetic value of the image, replacing the previous classification scheme of judging the beauty and unbeauty of the image by the threshold value, and propose a self-weighted Earth Mover’s Distance loss to better fit human subjective scoring. Based on the baseline model, we further introduce several strategies including an attention mechanism, the dilated convolution, and adaptive pooling, to enhance the performance. Finally, we design several groups of comparative experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our baseline aesthetic model and the introduced improvement strategies.
