  Visual aesthetic assessment has been an active research field for decades.
Although latest methods have achieved promising performance on benchmark
datasets, they typically rely on a large number of manual annotations including
both aesthetic labels and related image attributes. In this paper, we revisit
the problem of image aesthetic assessment from the self-supervised feature
learning perspective. Our motivation is that a suitable feature representation
for image aesthetic assessment should be able to distinguish different
expert-designed image manipulations, which have close relationships with
negative aesthetic effects. To this end, we design two novel pretext tasks to
identify the types and parameters of editing operations applied to synthetic
instances. The features from our pretext tasks are then adapted for a one-layer
linear classifier to evaluate the performance in terms of binary aesthetic
classification. We conduct extensive quantitative experiments on three
benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our approach can faithfully extract
aesthetics-aware features and outperform alternative pretext schemes. Moreover,
we achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art supervised methods that use
10 million labels from ImageNet.
