A photograph can be technically clear and still fail to appeal to the person
looking at it. This research examined whether computational models could
represent some of that subjective judgment and use it when organizing or
searching consumer photos and videos.
The first search study combined textual relevance with an automatically
estimated aesthetic score. Thirty-seven participants made one thing clear:
visual appeal influenced their choices, but how much it mattered shifted with
the query and with the person doing the searching. There was no universal
ranking.
Related work represented photographic composition through features inspired
by simplicity, visual balance, golden-mean placement, and golden triangles. It
also tested category-specific models rather than assuming that portraits,
landscapes, and other kinds of photographs should be judged in the same way.
Video posed a different problem. A study of 160 consumer clips selected seven
visual features and reported 73% accuracy on a binary high-versus-low
aesthetic classification task.
Comments also became data. In a 58-person evaluation of image-search results,
comment-based aesthetic predictions were stronger than visual content alone
for that particular setting.
These systems modeled reported preferences and signals from particular
datasets, not an objective definition of beauty. Their hand-designed features,
categories, and comments may carry the assumptions of a platform or community
and may not transfer to other cultures, genres, or periods.
The work overlaps with MAMI in its interest in personal
photographs, but asks a different question: MAMI retrieves images through
spoken annotations, while these studies estimate visual appeal and use it in
ranking.
Pere Obrador, Xavier Anguera, Rodrigo de Oliveira, Nuria Oliver (2009). The Role of Tags and Image Aesthetics in Social Image Search. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGMM Workshop on Social Media, 65-72. https://doi.org/10.1145/1631144.1631158
BibTeX
@inproceedings{obrador2009tags,
author = {Pere Obrador and Xavier Anguera and Rodrigo de Oliveira and Nuria Oliver},
title = {The Role of Tags and Image Aesthetics in Social Image Search},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGMM Workshop on Social Media},
pages = {65--72},
year = 2009,
doi = {10.1145/1631144.1631158},
cites = 38,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Anush K. Moorthy, Pere Obrador, Nuria Oliver (2010). Towards Computational Models of the Visual Aesthetic Appeal of Consumer Videos. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2010), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15555-0_1
BibTeX
@inproceedings{moorthy2010aesthetic,
author = {Anush K. Moorthy and Pere Obrador and Nuria Oliver},
title = {Towards Computational Models of the Visual Aesthetic Appeal of Consumer Videos},
booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2010)},
publisher = {Springer},
pages = {1--14},
year = 2010,
doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-15555-0_1},
cites = 104,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Pere Obrador, Ludwig Schmidt-Hackenberg, Nuria Oliver (2010). The Role of Image Composition in Image Aesthetics. 2010 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 3185-3188. https://doi.org/10.1109/icip.2010.5654231
BibTeX
@inproceedings{obrador2010composition,
author = {Pere Obrador and Ludwig Schmidt-Hackenberg and Nuria Oliver},
title = {The Role of Image Composition in Image Aesthetics},
booktitle = {2010 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)},
pages = {3185--3188},
year = 2010,
doi = {10.1109/icip.2010.5654231},
cites = 119,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Pere Obrador, Michele A. Saad, Poonam Suryanarayan, Nuria Oliver (2012). Towards Category-Based Aesthetic Models of Photographs. International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2012), 63-76. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27355-1_9
BibTeX
@inproceedings{obrador2012aesthetic,
author = {Pere Obrador and Michele A. Saad and Poonam Suryanarayan and Nuria Oliver},
title = {Towards Category-Based Aesthetic Models of Photographs},
booktitle = {International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2012)},
publisher = {Springer},
pages = {63--76},
year = 2012,
doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-27355-1_9},
cites = 39,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
Jose San Pedro, Tom Yeh, Nuria Oliver (2012). Leveraging User Comments for Aesthetic Aware Image Search Reranking. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2012), 439-448. https://doi.org/10.1145/2187836.2187896
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sanpedro2012aesthetic,
author = {Jose San Pedro and Tom Yeh and Nuria Oliver},
title = {Leveraging User Comments for Aesthetic Aware Image Search Reranking},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2012)},
pages = {439--448},
year = 2012,
doi = {10.1145/2187836.2187896},
cites = 71,
citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}