Semantics-Aware Image Aesthetics Assessment using Tag Matching and Contrastive Ranking

The perception of image aesthetics is built upon the understanding of semantic content. However, how to evaluate the aesthetic quality of images with diversified semantic backgrounds remains challenging in image aesthetics assessment (IAA). To address the dilemma, this paper presents a semantics-aware image aesthetics assessment approach, which first analyzes the semantic content of images and then models the aesthetic distinctions among images from two perspectives, i.e., aesthetic attribute and aesthetic level. Concretely, we propose two strategies, dubbed tag matching and contrastive ranking, to extract knowledge pertaining to image aesthetics. The tag matching identifies the semantic category and the dominant aesthetic attributes based on predefined tag libraries. The contrastive ranking is designed to uncover the comparative relationships among images with different aesthetic levels but similar semantic backgrounds. In the process of contrastive ranking, the impact of long-tailed distribution of aesthetic data is also considered by balanced sampling and traversal contrastive learning. Extensive experiments and comparisons on three benchmark IAA databases demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model in terms of both prediction accuracy and alleviating long-tailed effect. The code will be public at https://github.com/yzc-ippl/TMCR **REMOVE 2nd URL**://github.com/yzc-ippl/TMCR.