Aesthetics Without Semantics

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Parraga, C. Alejandro, Penacchio, Olivier, Gonzalez, Marcos Muňoz, Raducanu, Bogdan, Otazu, Xavier
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Parraga, C. Alejandro
Penacchio, Olivier
Gonzalez, Marcos Muňoz
Raducanu, Bogdan
Otazu, Xavier
author_facet Parraga, C. Alejandro
Penacchio, Olivier
Gonzalez, Marcos Muňoz
Raducanu, Bogdan
Otazu, Xavier
contents While it is easy for human observers to judge an image as beautiful or ugly, aesthetic decisions result from a combination of entangled perceptual and cognitive (semantic) factors, making the understanding of aesthetic judgements particularly challenging from a scientific point of view. Furthermore, our research shows a prevailing bias in current databases, which include mostly beautiful images, further complicating the study and prediction of aesthetic responses. We address these limitations by creating a database of images with minimal semantic content and devising, and next exploiting, a method to generate images on the ugly side of aesthetic valuations. The resulting Minimum Semantic Content (MSC) database consists of a large and balanced collection of 10,426 images, each evaluated by 100 observers. We next use established image metrics to demonstrate how augmenting an image set biased towards beautiful images with ugly images can modify, or even invert, an observed relationship between image features and aesthetics valuation. Taken together, our study reveals that works in empirical aesthetics attempting to link image content and aesthetic judgements may magnify, underestimate, or simply miss interesting effects due to a limitation of the range of aesthetic values they consider.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aesthetics Without Semantics
Parraga, C. Alejandro
Penacchio, Olivier
Gonzalez, Marcos Muňoz
Raducanu, Bogdan
Otazu, Xavier
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neurons and Cognition
Computation
While it is easy for human observers to judge an image as beautiful or ugly, aesthetic decisions result from a combination of entangled perceptual and cognitive (semantic) factors, making the understanding of aesthetic judgements particularly challenging from a scientific point of view. Furthermore, our research shows a prevailing bias in current databases, which include mostly beautiful images, further complicating the study and prediction of aesthetic responses. We address these limitations by creating a database of images with minimal semantic content and devising, and next exploiting, a method to generate images on the ugly side of aesthetic valuations. The resulting Minimum Semantic Content (MSC) database consists of a large and balanced collection of 10,426 images, each evaluated by 100 observers. We next use established image metrics to demonstrate how augmenting an image set biased towards beautiful images with ugly images can modify, or even invert, an observed relationship between image features and aesthetics valuation. Taken together, our study reveals that works in empirical aesthetics attempting to link image content and aesthetic judgements may magnify, underestimate, or simply miss interesting effects due to a limitation of the range of aesthetic values they consider.
title Aesthetics Without Semantics
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neurons and Cognition
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05331