Thinking Aesthetics Assessment of Image Color Temperature: Models, Datasets and Benchmarks

Color temperature, as a crucial attribute influencing image color, plays a critical role in Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA). Yet, within the existing IAA field, little light has been shed on assessing the aesthetic quality of image color temperature. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new task: Image Color Temperature Aesthetics Assessment (ICTAA). However, this task poses the following challenges: 1) Perceptual Sensitivity: humans exhibit high sensitivity to subtle shifts in color temperature, necessitating a model to enable fine-grained discrimination; 2) Spectral Continuity: The theoretical modeling of color temperature aesthetics requires continuous labels; however, the just-noticeable-difference property of human perception makes continuous labeling infeasible, necessitating a well-designed labeling strategy. To address the aforementioned challenges, we make the following efforts. First, we propose a multi-modal contrastive learning framework, ICTA2Net, that models color temperature differences between image pairs while strictly controlling other visual attributes. Second, leveraging color temperature transitivity, we design a weakly supervised strategy that discretely samples images based on anchor images and human perception to build contrastive relations across color temperatures, enabling learning from discrete labels. Thirdly, we construct a color temperature aesthetics dataset, ICTAA240K, and a benchmark for validation. Additionally, we propose a new metric, Information Entropy-weighted Accuracy (IEA), which weights accuracy by the degree of annotation disagreement to reflect model performance across varying sample difficulties, complementing existing evaluation metrics. Experiments show our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art IAA methods on ICTAA240K, thereby setting an effective roadmap for ICTAA.