Focusing on Subtle Differences: A Feature Disentanglement Model for Series Photo Selection

Nowadays, capturing cherished moments results in an abundance of photos, which necessitates the selection of the finest one from a pool of akin images'a process both intricate and time-intensive. Thus, series photo selection (SPS) techniques have been developed to recommend the optimal moment from nearly identical photos through the use of aesthetic quality assessment. However, addressing SPS proves demanding due to the subtle nuances within such imagery. Existing approaches predominantly rely on diverse feature types (e.g., color, layout, generic features) extracted from original images to discern the qualified shot, yet they disregard disentangling generality and specificity at the feature level. This study aims to detect subtle aesthetic distinctions among akin photos. We propose a feature separation model that captures all label-relevant information through an encoder. We introduce Information Bottleneck (IB) learning to obtain non-redundant representations of image pairs and filter out noise information from the representations. Our model segregates image features into shared and specific attributes by employing feature constraints to boost mutual information across images and guide meaningful information within individual images. This process filters out extraneous data within individual images, thus significantly enhancing the representation of similar image pairs. Extensive experiments on the Phototriage dataset show that our model can accentuate subtle disparities and achieve superior results when compared to alternative methods.