Can We Measure the Beauty of an Image?

Although the concept of image quality has been a subject of study for the image processing community for more than forty years, notions related to aesthetics of pictures have only appeared in the last ten years. Studies devoted to this theme are growing today, taking advantage of machine learning techniques, and the proliferation of specialized websites for archiving photos on the Internet. Before examining the progress of such computer methods, we recall the earlier approaches to aesthetics measurement. Then, we take a look at the work done in the community of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, we compare the presented results, and we critically examine the steps taken.