Image Aesthetics Assessment Using Graph Attention Network

Aspect ratio and spatial layout are two of the principal factors influencing the aesthetic value of a photograph. However, incorporating these into the traditional convolution-based frameworks for the task of image aesthetics assessment is problematic. The aspect ratio of the photographs gets distorted while they are resized/cropped to a fixed dimension to facilitate training batch sampling. On the other hand, the convolutional filters process information locally and are limited in their ability to model the global spatial layout of a photograph. In this work, we present a two-stage framework based on graph neural networks and address both these problems jointly. First, we propose a feature-graph representation in which the input image is modelled as a graph, maintaining its original aspect ratio and resolution. Second, we propose a graph neural network architecture that takes this feature-graph and captures the semantic relationship between different regions of the input image using visual attention. Our experiments show that the proposed framework advances the state-of-the-art results in aesthetic score regression on the Aesthetic Visual Analysis (AVA) benchmark. Our code is publicly available for comparisons and further explorations. ¹