Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Computing Aesthetics with Image Judgement
Systems
Juan Romero, Penousal Machado, Adrian Carballal, and João Correia
Abstract
The ability of human or artificial agents to evaluate their works, as well
as the works of others, is an important aspect of creative behaviour, possibly even a
requirement. In artistic fields such as visual arts and music, this evaluation capacity
relies, at least partially, on aesthetic judgement. This chapter analyses issues regard-
ing the development of computational systems that perform aesthetic judgements
focusing on their validation. We present several alternatives, as follows: the use of
psychological tests related to aesthetic judgement; the testing of these systems in
style recognition tasks; and the assessment of the system's ability to predict the
users' valuations or the popularity of a given work. An adaptive system is presented
and its performance assessed using the above-mentioned validation methodologies.
11.1 Introduction
Creativity is frequently associated with the capacity to create artworks. Therefore,
the design of computing systems which have the skills to create artworks can pro-
vide interesting insights into a general understanding of creativity. Spector and
Alpern (
1994
) define a “Constructed Artist” as an entity that is “. . . supposed to be
capable of creating aesthetically meritorious artworks on their own, with minimal
