"Special Relativity" of Image Aesthetics Assessment: a Preliminary Empirical Perspective

Image aesthetics assessment (IAA) primarily examines image quality from a user-centric perspective and can be applied to guide various applications, including image capture, recommendation, and enhancement. The fundamental issue in IAA revolves around the quantification of image aesthetics. Existing methodologies rely on assigning a scalar (or a distribution) to represent aesthetic value based on conventional practices, which confines this scalar within a specific range and artificially labels it. However, conventional methods rarely incorporate research on interpretability, particularly lacking systematic responses to the following three fundamental questions: 1) Can aesthetic qualities be quantified? 2) What is the nature of quantifying aesthetics? 3) How can aesthetics be accurately quantified? In this paper, we present a law called "Special Relativity" of IAA (SR-IAA) that addresses the aforementioned core questions. We have developed a Multi-Attribute IAA Framework (MAINet), which serves as a preliminary validation for SR-IAA within the existing datasets and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Specifically, our metrics on multi-attribute assessment outperform the second-best performance by 8.06% (AADB), 1.67% (PARA), and 2.44% (SPAQ) in terms of SRCC. We anticipate that our research will offer innovative theoretical guidance to the IAA research community. All resources are available here.