Aesthetic Measure of Architectural Photography utilizing Computer Vision: Parts-from-Wholes

The existing methods for solution space navigation require numerical values to score solutions. The authors introduce a method of quantitative aesthetic evaluation utilizing Computer Vision (CV) as a criterion to navigate solution spaces. Therefore, aesthetics can complement structural, environmental, and other quantitative criteria. The work stands in the extended history of quantifying the visual aesthetic experience. Some precedents are: Birkhoff [1933] and Max Bense [1965] built an approach with experiments to empirically support a measure, whereas Birkin [2010], Ostwald, and Vaughan [2016] devised the first computational methods working on vector drawings. Our research automates and accelerates aesthetic quantification by utilizing CV to extract computable datasets from images. We are especially keen on architectural images as a shorthand to assign an aesthetic value to design, aiming to navigate the solution space in architecture. This work devises a method for rearranging parts in architectural images focusing on formal aspects, in opposition to semantic segmentation where objects unrelated to architectural design (cars, persons, sky…) are quantified to score images [Verma and Jana and Ramamritham 2018]. It uses Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) [Matas 2004] to recognize architectural parts because it is superior to similar methods such as SimpleBlobDetector in this task. Our method disassembles the parts in a diagram of scaled parts (Fig. 2) to analyze them in isolation, and a diagram of connectivity graph (Fig. 3), to evaluate relationships. These diagrams are examined to compare photos of buildings, cars, and trees to assess the applicability of such a method to a range of objects. Parts and connections are thus quantified, and these values are inputted in a refined version of Birkhoff’s formula to calculate an aesthetic score for each image for navigating the solution space. Finally, it tests the method to draw comparisons between the discrete and continuous paradigms (Fig. 1) in the contemporary discourse of architecture, comparing Zaha Hadid Architects` Heydar Aliyev Centre and Gilles Retsin´s Diamonds House to argue that there is a difference between the aesthetic effects of continuous and discrete designs, besides their distinction in tectonic logic. The method proved to be an efficient procedure for comparatively quantifying the aesthetic judgment of architectural images, enabling designers to incorporate aesthetics as a complementary criterion for solution space navigation in computational design. The method of computational aesthetic measure for solution space navigation and its calibrations via crowdsourced evaluation of images is further detailed in a paper by the authors being published at the 2022 eCAADe conference.