Google To Replace Judges?

[Mike Farley]

Google has a new AI system which can assess images for both technical and aesthetic quality. It can also make automatic edits to enhance shots. Conveniently, it even scores out of 10.

More at PetaPixel - https://petapixel.com/2017/12/26/google ... c-quality/.

[davidb]

Looking at some of the scores given by NIMA I'm not sure CCC members would want to use it. Where are the certificate winners?

I don't think I want Google changing my images

[Ronald Barker]

Interesting not one score achieving any were near 9 or above, the humans score being slightly higher.
maybe our judges are being generous, in the case of goggle scoring, an image needs to be perfect to score a 10, but in who's eyes?
It would be interesting to see how some of our 10 scoring images would do.

[Mike Farley]

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is becoming more capable when it comes to analysing images. That includes not just identifying "faults" such as highlights at the edges of images which can interfere with perception, but subject matter as well. When I posted my original comment, I had similar thoughts to Ron. The pictures used were all quite generic and not particularly inspiring. It would be interesting to see how photos which do well at, say, a PAGB assessment would fare against NIMA. We see a particular style of image tend do well within the camera club community, but that is only a subset of possible photographic genres.

There are those which sell for huge amounts of money, which I mentioned in a recent post. Rhine II by Andreas Gursky, for which someone has been willing to pay in excess of $4m at auction, could prove to be quite a challenge. The issue, of course, is that image assessment is so very subjective. I suspect that those who created NIMA have so far picked only the low hanging fruit, which accounts for the example photos illustrating the article.

I have seen an estimate that there will be 1.7 trillion photographs taken in 2017. Very few of those will be artistic masterpieces and automated analysis would suffice for the majority. Maybe that is where the creators of NIMA have set their sights. For the small percentage which remain, there will be a range of diversity when it comes to aesthetic appeal. NIMA can never be an absolute arbiter unless it can be programmed to function at different levels.

[Iggy]

Google has a new AI system

Is that application available to check one's images?

Yesterday's human judge though was pretty fair, I thought, with a good spread of scoring from 10 to 5, 6, or 6.5 depending on the class.

Iggy

[Mike Farley]

Google has a new AI system

Is that application available to check one's images?

Why not Google it?

[Mike Farley]

Brook Jensen's view. He is not impressed and does not believe that AI can pass aesthetic judgement without bypassing personal expression and making all images conform to the same set of ideals.

http://www.lenswork.com/podcast/LW1064% ... nkings.mp3

[Compsec]

It’s nothing new. There has long been a form of intelligence which gives judgment supposedly by-passing personal feelings and expressions, conforming to the same set of ideals, no matter how right or wrong, week in, week out. In football we call them referees! The VAR system introduced this month to help them look again at decisions they make in matches on matters such as penalties and goals, has been used in two games so far and they have still got it wrong. It is the human link that is the unpredictable and illogical element in these decisions.

AI judging can’t be too far away. My old Nikon F5 film camera had a metering system which compared thousands of photographic settings to select the right exposure when set on Program; worked perfectly well when needed (and I’m sure other cameras had similar software). If AI judges were programmed using thousands of award winning images containing technical and ‘aesthetic’ data as references, would they not have better decision making abilities than a judge who marks down pictures because they disliked dogs & old cars and another who wants all landscapes cropped?

Regards

Chris

[Mike Farley]

I recall a judge from a few years ago who was totally averse to any use of negative space. To the extent that he held on to the first print he appraised in the competition to demonstrate how he would crop just about all the others which followed. For him, the shot was about the subject and nothing else. Now Twitter has introduced an AI system which purports to find the principle point of interest and crops the image accordingly.

Details at DPReview - https://www.dpreview.com/news/609519334 ... ching-bits.