Learning Personalized Image Aesthetics From Subjective and Objective Attributes

Due to the widespread popularity of social media, researchers have developed a strong interest in learning the personalized image aesthetics of online users. Personalized image aesthetics assessment (PIAA) aims to study the aesthetic preferences of individual users for images, which should be affected by the properties of both users and images. Existing PIAA approaches usually use the generic aesthetics learned from images as a prior model and adapt it to PIAA models through a small number of data annotated by individual users. However, the prior model merely learns the objective attributes of images, which is agnostic to the subjective attributes of users, complicating efficient learning of the personalized image aesthetics of individual users. Therefore, we propose a personalized image aesthetics assessment method that integrates the subjective attributes of users and objective attributes of images simultaneously. To characterize these two attributes jointly, an attribute extraction module is introduced to learn users’ personality traits and image aesthetic attributes. Then, an aesthetic prior model is built from numerous individual users’ annotated data, which leverages the personality traits of users and the aesthetic attributes of rated images as prior knowledge to model both the image aesthetic distribution and users’ residual scores relative to generic aesthetics simultaneously. Finally, a PIAA model is obtained by fine-tuning the aesthetic prior model with an individual user’s annotated data. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to existing PIAA methods in learning individual users’ personalized image aesthetics.