Studying aesthetics in photographic images using a computational approach

A computer-based method of inferring and utilizing aesthetic quality of photographs and other images, comprising the steps of:

• receiving a plurality of digitized images along with aesthetic-based ratings of the images;
• performing one or more software operations on the digitized images to automatically extract a plurality of visual features representative of each image;
• receiving an image without an aesthetic-based rating;
• automatically extracting a plurality of visual features representative of the received image;
• computing a familiarity measure for the received image by correlating the visual features extracted from the received image to the visual features extracted from the other images;
• determining an aesthetic-based rating for the received image on the basis of the familiarity measure, wherein a lower familiarity is indicative of originality and a higher rating;
• and
• using one or more statistical methods to correlate the extracted visual features and the aesthetic-based ratings to classify the images on the basis of aesthetic value, rate the images on a scale relating to aesthetics value, or select/eliminate an image based upon aesthetic quality.