HumanAesExpert: Advancing a Multi-Modality Foundation Model for Human Image Aesthetic Assessment
This work addresses a specific gap in image aesthetic assessment for human images, which is incremental but provides a new dataset and model for this domain.
The paper tackles the under-explored problem of Human Image Aesthetic Assessment (HIAA) by introducing HumanBeauty, a new dataset of 108k human images with manual annotations, and HumanAesExpert, a vision-language model that achieves significantly better performance than state-of-the-art models in HIAA.
Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) is a long-standing and challenging research task. However, its subset, Human Image Aesthetic Assessment (HIAA), has been scarcely explored. To bridge this research gap, our work pioneers a holistic implementation framework tailored for HIAA. Specifically, we introduce HumanBeauty, the first dataset purpose-built for HIAA, which comprises 108k high-quality human images with manual annotations. To achieve comprehensive and fine-grained HIAA, 50K human images are manually collected through a rigorous curation process and annotated leveraging our trailblazing 12-dimensional aesthetic standard, while the remaining 58K with overall aesthetic labels are systematically filtered from public datasets. Based on the HumanBeauty database, we propose HumanAesExpert, a powerful Vision Language Model for aesthetic evaluation of human images. We innovatively design an Expert head to incorporate human knowledge of aesthetic sub-dimensions while jointly utilizing the Language Modeling (LM) and Regression heads. This approach empowers our model to achieve superior proficiency in both overall and fine-grained HIAA. Furthermore, we introduce a MetaVoter, which aggregates scores from all three heads, to effectively balance the capabilities of each head, thereby realizing improved assessment precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HumanAesExpert models deliver significantly better performance in HIAA than other state-of-the-art models. Project webpage: https://humanaesexpert.github.io/HumanAesExpert/