Computational Approaches to Aesthetic Quality Assessment of Digital Photographs: State of the Art and Future Research Directives

The term "Aesthetic" means the philosophy of beauty. In the field of art and photography, it relates to the artistic choice and appreciation of artistry. Computational assessment of aesthetic appeal of photographs is a highly idiosyncratic job. Because of this lot of researchers are interested in this area in present days. It is an interdisciplinary area related to computer vision, art and psychology. Since there is no universal standard for evaluation of aesthetic value, hence many common viewer believe that some certain features of a photograph play a vital role to make a photograph aesthetically pleasant. This survey focuses on a systematic audit of the newfangled techniques for the evaluation of aesthetic quality of photographs. The existing studies reveal that aesthetic quality of photographs depend on the compositional rules like Rule of Third, Golden ratio, Depth of field, and the color space features such as hue, saturation, texture. The purposes of this paper are to present current state of the art in aesthetic evaluation of photographs and provide few future research directions in this area. These future research directions are based on some interesting and unexplored rules of composition like Spiral structure, Framing, Symmetry, Pattern and others. These can be used for better assessment of aesthetic values of photographs.