Image integrity and aesthetics: towards a more encompassing definition of visual quality

Visual quality is a multifaceted quantity that depends on multiple attributes of the image/video. According to Keelan’s definition, artifactual attributes concern features of the image that when visible, are annoying and compromise the integrity of the image. Aesthetic attributes instead depend on the observer’s personal taste. Both types of attributes have been studied in the literature in relation to visual quality, but never in conjunction with each other. In this paper we perform a psychometric experiment to investigate how artifactual and aesthetic attributes interact, and how they affect the viewing behavior. In particular, we studied to what extent the appearance of artifacts impacts the aesthetic quality of images. Our results indicate that indeed image integrity somehow influences the aesthetic quality scores. By means of an eye-tracker, we also recorded and analyzed the viewing behavior of our participants while scoring aesthetic quality. Results reveal that, when scoring aesthetic quality, viewing behavior significantly departs from the natural free looking, as well as from the viewing behavior observed for integrity scoring.