Computational Aesthetics of Visual Artworks: Review and Outlook

Beauty has always been the goal of human activity. The meaning of beauty is defined during its creation. The discussion of beauty by mathematicians has created the computational aesthetics. This paper reviews the related works in computational aesthetics of visual arts and summarizes the features used in aesthetic measurement. The features extracted from the visual artworks are divided into five types including visual, compositional, statistical, perceptual and artistic features. Based on those features, the visual images are quantified and analyzed on their aesthetic and artistic properties. The previous studies are mostly focused on the aesthetics of art production, the continuous process for artistic creation cannot be represented. Moreover, new forms of visual arts such as generative art emerged, which provide new opportunities and challenges to the field of computational aesthetics. A prospective on the algorithms for the evaluation of this new forms of visual arts will be given.