Multi-scale structural complexity as a quantitative measure of visual complexity
This work addresses the challenge of formally measuring visual complexity for researchers in computer vision and psychology, but it is incremental as it applies an existing measure to a new domain with competitive results.
The authors tackled the problem of quantifying visual complexity by proposing the multi-scale structural complexity (MSSC) measure, which correlates with human subjective scores on an image dataset similarly to existing methods while being more intuitive and easier to compute.
While intuitive for humans, the concept of visual complexity is hard to define and quantify formally. We suggest adopting the multi-scale structural complexity (MSSC) measure, an approach that defines structural complexity of an object as the amount of dissimilarities between distinct scales in its hierarchical organization. In this work, we apply MSSC to the case of visual stimuli, using an open dataset of images with subjective complexity scores obtained from human participants (SAVOIAS). We demonstrate that MSSC correlates with subjective complexity on par with other computational complexity measures, while being more intuitive by definition, consistent across categories of images, and easier to compute. We discuss objective and subjective elements inherently present in human perception of complexity and the domains where the two are more likely to diverge. We show how the multi-scale nature of MSSC allows further investigation of complexity as it is perceived by humans.