Joint regression and learning from pairwise rankings for personalized image aesthetic assessment

Recent image aesthetic assessment methodshave achieved remarkable progress due to the emergence of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However,these methods focus primarily on predicting generally perceived preference of an image, making them usually have limited practicability, since each user may have completely different preferences for the same image. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel approach for predicting personalized image aesthetics that fit an individual user’s personal taste. We achieve this in a coarse to fine manner, by joint regression and learning from pairwise rankings. Specifically, we first collect a small subset of personal images from a user and invite him/her to rank the preference of some randomly sampled image pairs. We then search for the $K$-nearest neighbors of the personal images within a large-scale dataset labeled with average human aesthetic scores, and use these images as well as the associated scores to train a generic aesthetic assessment model by CNN-based regression. Next, we fine-tune the generic model to accommodate the personal preference by training over the rankings with a pairwise hinge loss. Experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively learn personalized image aesthetic preferences, clearly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we show that the learned personalized image aesthetic benefits a wide variety of applications.