MetaMP: Metalearning-Based Multipatch Image Aesthetics Assessment

Image aesthetics assessment (IAA) is a subjective and complex task. The aesthetics of different themes vary greatly in content and aesthetic results, whether they are in the same aesthetic community or not. In aesthetic evaluation tasks, the pretrained network with direct fine-tune may not be able to quickly adapt to tasks on various themes. This article introduces a metalearning-based multipatch (MetaMP) IAA method to adapt to various thematic tasks quickly. The network is trained based on metalearning to obtain content-oriented aesthetic expression. In addition, we design a complete-information patch selection scheme and a multipatch (MP) network to make the fine details fit the overall impression. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art models based on aesthetic visual analysis (AVA) benchmark datasets. In addition, the evaluation of the dataset shows the effectiveness of our metalearning training model, which not only improves MetaMP assessment accuracy but also provides valuable guidance for network initialization of IAA.