  Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently been shown to generate
promising results for aesthetics assessment. However, the performance of these
deep CNN methods is often compromised by the constraint that the neural network
only takes the fixed-size input. To accommodate this requirement, input images
need to be transformed via cropping, warping, or padding, which often alter
image composition, reduce image resolution, or cause image distortion. Thus the
aesthetics of the original images is impaired because of potential loss of fine
grained details and holistic image layout. However, such fine grained details
and holistic image layout is critical for evaluating an image's aesthetics. In
this paper, we present an Adaptive Layout-Aware Multi-Patch Convolutional
Neural Network (A-Lamp CNN) architecture for photo aesthetic assessment. This
novel scheme is able to accept arbitrary sized images, and learn from both
fined grained details and holistic image layout simultaneously. To enable
training on these hybrid inputs, we extend the method by developing a dedicated
double-subnet neural network structure, i.e. a Multi-Patch subnet and a
Layout-Aware subnet. We further construct an aggregation layer to effectively
combine the hybrid features from these two subnets. Extensive experiments on
the large-scale aesthetics assessment benchmark (AVA) demonstrate significant
performance improvement over the state-of-the-art in photo aesthetic
assessment.
