Image harmony for consumer images

Images elicit a variety of emotional responses related to image content, overall aesthetic appeal, or a combination of both. One aspect of aesthetic appeal is harmony: the pleasing or congruent arrangement of parts producing internal calm or tranquility. We conducted a series of experiments to identify what low level features could predict harmony in an image. Subjective judgments of image harmony were collected for images representative of typical consumer photography. Our initial results show that for simplified images (pixelated to control for emotional responses to scenes and objects) impressions of image harmony depend on statistical properties of low level local features. The feature combinations vary for different individuals but typically involve edge contrast, average lightness and range of lightness. At the same time inclusion of Gestalt principles is needed to account for the subjects´ data. Additionally, global low level features related to spatial image structure may help to explain results with black and white and color images.