The role of visual attention in the aesthetic appeal of consumer images: A preliminary study

Predicting the aesthetic appeal of images is of great interest for a number of applications, from image retrieval to visual quality optimization. In this paper, we report a preliminary study on the relationship between visual attention deployment and aesthetic appeal judgment. In particular, we seek to validate through a scientific approach those simplicity and compositional rules of thumb that have been applied by photographers and modeled by computer vision scientists in computational aesthetics algorithms. Our results provide a confirmation that both simplicity and composition matter for aesthetic appeal of images, and indicate effective ways to compute them directly from the saliency distribution of an image.