Rule of Thirds and Simplicity for Image Aesthetics using Deep Neural Networks

Considering the increasing amount of photos being uploaded to sharing platforms, a proper evaluation of photo appeal or aesthetics is required. For appealing images several "rules of thumb" have been established, e.g., the rule of thirds and simplicity. We handle rule of thirds and simplicity as binary classification problems with a deep learning based image processing pipeline. Our pipeline uses a pre-processing step, a pre-trained baseline deep neural network (DNN) and post-processing. For each of the rules, we re-train 17 pre-trained DNN models using transfer learning. Our results for publicly available datasets show that the ResNet152 DNN is best for rule of thirds prediction and DenseNet121 is best for simplicity with an accuracy of around 0.84 and 0.94 respectively. In addition to the datasets for both classifications, five experts annotated another dataset with ≈ 1100 images and we evaluate the best performing models. Results show that the best performing models have an accuracy of 0.67 for rule of thirds and 0.79 for image simplicity. Both accuracy results are within the range of pairwise accuracy of expert annotators. However, it further indicates that there is a high subjective influence for both of the considered rules.