Generating Aesthetic Based Critique For Photographs

The recent surge in deep learning methods across multiple modalities has resulted in an increased interest in image captioning. Most advances in image captioning are still focused on the generation of factual-centric captions, which mainly describe the contents of an image. However, generating captions to provide a meaningful and opinionated critique of photographs is less studied. This paper presents a framework for leveraging aesthetic features encoded from an image aesthetic scorer, to synthesize human-like textual critique via a sequence decoder. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show that the proposed method is capable of producing promising results on relevant metrics relating to semantic diversity and synonymity, with qualitative observations demonstrating likewise. We also suggest the use of Word Mover’s Distance as a semantically intuitive and informative metric for this task.