Friday, May 22, 2009

Can a machine rate your images?

So I am back...hopefully with more posts per week than before! So here's a quick one.

Can a machine rate your images? The makers of Acquine (Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine) believe it can. http://acquine.alipr.com/

User have thrown some really well known images at it with strange results. The famous Afghan Girl that is one of the most famous National Geographic magazine covers ever gets a modest score of 78.1 My own personal best shot at DP Challenge and ribbon winner at the Foothills Camera Club gets a 96.9.

So what does this mean? Nothing really. The engine can be somewhat fooled. A larger image does better. (e.g. I rated my image using a link from the FCC website and the score drops to 93). In a thread on DP Challenge, users have indicated that bumping up saturation will also increase scores.

That being said, looking through the top rated images on Acquine, I think that the shots are pretty good with most being exceptional.