Subject Bias in Image Aesthetic Appeal Ratings

Automatic prediction of image aesthetic appeal is an important part of multimedia and computer vision research, as it contributes to providing better content quality to users. Various features and learning methods have been proposed in the past to predict image aesthetic appeal more accurately. The effectiveness of these proposed methods often depend on the data used to train the predictor. Since aesthetic appeal is a subjective construct, factors that influence the subjectivity in aesthetic appeal data need to be understood and addressed. In this paper, we look into the subjectivity of aesthetic appeal data, and how it relates with image characteristics that are often used in aesthetic appeal prediction. We use subject bias and confidence interval to measure subjectivity, and check how they might be influenced by image content category and features