Joint Learning of Image Aesthetic Quality Assessment and Semantic Recognition Based on Feature Enhancement

Aesthetic quality assessment and semantic recognition are the two fundamental aspects of image perception and understanding tasks. Though these two tasks are related, most of the current research generally treats them as independent problems without any interaction. In this paper, we explore the relationships between aesthetic quality assessment and semantic recognition task, and employ a multi-task convolutional neural network with feature enhancement mechanism to effectively integrate these two tasks. A novel Enhanced Aggregation of Features Network (EAFNet) for joint learning of the two tasks is proposed to enhance the valid features and suppress the invalid features of each task in both channel and spatial dimensions. Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets well verify the superior performance of EAFNet in handling aesthetic quality assessment and semantic recognition tasks.