  Aesthetic quality prediction is a challenging task in the computer vision
community because of the complex interplay with semantic contents and
photographic technologies. Recent studies on the powerful deep learning based
aesthetic quality assessment usually use a binary high-low label or a numerical
score to represent the aesthetic quality. However the scalar representation
cannot describe well the underlying varieties of the human perception of
aesthetics. In this work, we propose to predict the aesthetic score
distribution (i.e., a score distribution vector of the ordinal basic human
ratings) using Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Conventional DCNNs
which aim to minimize the difference between the predicted scalar numbers or
vectors and the ground truth cannot be directly used for the ordinal basic
rating distribution. Thus, a novel CNN based on the Cumulative distribution
with Jensen-Shannon divergence (CJS-CNN) is presented to predict the aesthetic
score distribution of human ratings, with a new reliability-sensitive learning
method based on the kurtosis of the score distribution, which eliminates the
requirement of the original full data of human ratings (without normalization).
Experimental results on large scale aesthetic dataset demonstrate the
effectiveness of our introduced CJS-CNN in this task.
