Aesthetic scoring of digital portraits for consumer applications

Computational Aesthetics applied on digital photography is becoming an interesting issue in different frameworks (e.g., photo album summarization, imaging acquisition devices). Although it is widely believed and can often be experimentally demonstrated that aesthetics is mainly subjective, we aim to find some formal or mathematical explanations of aesthetics in photographs. We propose a scoring function to give an aesthetic evaluation of digital portraits and group pictures, taking into account faces aspect ratio, their perceptual goodness in terms of lighting of the skin and their position. Also well known composition rules (e.g., rule of thirds) are considered especially for single portrait. Both subjective and quantitatively experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.