Thinking Image Color Aesthetics Assessment: Models, Datasets and Benchmarks

We present a comprehensive study on a new task named image color aesthetics assessment (ICAA), which aims to assess color aesthetics based on human perception. ICAA is important for various applications such as imaging measurement and image analysis. However, due to the highly diverse aesthetic preferences and numerous color combinations, ICAA presents more challenges than conventional image quality assessment tasks. To advance ICAA research, 1) we propose a baseline model called the Delegate Transformer, which not only deploys deformable transformers to adaptively allocate interest points, but also learns human color space segmentation behavior by the dedicated module. 2) We elaborately build a color-oriented dataset, ICAA17K, containing 17K images, covering 30 popular color combinations, 80 devices and 50 scenes, with each image densely annotated by more than 1,500 people. Moreover, we develop a large-scale benchmark of 15 methods, the most comprehensive one thus far based on two datasets, SPAQ and ICAA17K. Our work, not only achieves state-of-the-art performance, but more importantly offers the community a roadmap to explore solutions for ICAA. Code and dataset are available in here.