Beauty is here: evaluating aesthetics in videos using multimodal features and free training data

The aesthetics of videos can be used as a useful clue to improve user satisfaction in many applications such as search and recommendation. In this paper, we demonstrate a computational approach to automatically evaluate the aesthetics of videos, with particular emphasis on identifying beautiful scenes. Using a standard classification pipeline, we analyze the effectiveness of a comprehensive set of features, ranging from low-level visual features, mid-level semantic attributes, to style descriptors. In addition, since there is limited public training data with manual labels of video aesthetics, we explore freely available resources with a simple assumption that people tend to share more aesthetically appealing works than unappealing ones. Specifically, we use images from DPChallenge and videos from Flickr as positive training data and the Dutch documentary videos as negative data, where the latter contain mostly old materials of low visual quality. Our extensive evaluations show that combining multiple features is helpful, and very promising results can be obtained using the noisy but annotation-free training data. On the NHK Multimedia Challenge dataset, we attain a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient of 0.41.