Region based image appeal metric for consumer photos

Image appeal may be defined as the interest that a photograph generates when viewed by human observers, incorporating subjective factors on top of the traditional objective quality measures. User studies were conducted in order to identify the right features to use in an image appeal measure; these studies also revealed that a photograph may be appealing even if only a region/area of the photograph is actually appealing. Extensive experimentation helped identify a good set of low level features, which were combined into a set of image appeal metrics. The appealing region detection and the image appeal metrics were validated with experiments conducted on 2000 ground truth images, each graded by three human observers. Two main image appeal metrics are presented: one that ranks the images based on image appeal with a high correlation with the human observations; and a second one which performs better at retrieving highly appealing images from an image collection.