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Statistical image properties of print advertisements, visual artworks and images of architecture.

ABSTRACT: Most visual advertisements are designed to attract attention, often by inducing a pleasant impression in human observers. Accordingly, results from brain imaging studies show that advertisements can activate the brain's reward circuitry, which is also involved in the perception of other visually pleasing images, such as artworks. At the image level, large subsets of artworks are characterized by specific statistical image properties, such as a high self-similarity and intermediate complexity. Moreover, some image properties are distributed uniformly across orientations in the artworks (low anisotropy). In the present study, we asked whether images of advertisements share these properties. To answer this question, subsets of different types of advertisements (single-product print advertisements, supermarket and department store leaflets, magazine covers and show windows) were analyzed using computer vision algorithms and compared to other types of images (photographs of simple objects, faces, large-vista natural scenes and branches). We show that, on average, images of advertisements and artworks share a similar degree of complexity (fractal dimension) and self-similarity, as well as similarities in the Fourier spectrum. However, images of advertisements are more anisotropic than artworks. Values for single-product advertisements resemble each other, independent of the type of product promoted (cars, cosmetics, fashion or other products). For comparison, we studied images of architecture as another type of visually pleasing stimuli and obtained comparable results. These findings support the general idea that, on average, man-made visually pleasing images are characterized by specific patterns of higher-order (global) image properties that distinguish them from other types of images. Whether these properties are necessary or sufficient to induce aesthetic perception and how they correlate with brain activation upon viewing advertisements remains to be investigated.

SUBMITTER: Braun J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3817471 | biostudies-other | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Project description:Several studies have shown that the power spectrum of x-ray breast images is well described by a power-law at lower frequencies where anatomical variability dominates. However, an image generated from a Gaussian process with this spectrum is easily distinguished from an image of actual breast tissue by eye. This demonstrates that higher order non-Gaussian statistical properties of mammograms are readily accessible to the visual system. The authors' purpose is to quantify and characterize non-Gaussian statistical properties of breast images as influenced by processing of a digital mammogram, different imaging modalities, and breast density.To quantify non-Gaussian statistical properties, the authors consider histograms of filter responses from the interior of a breast image that have similar properties to receptive fields in the early visual system. They quantify departure from a Gaussian distribution by the relative entropy of the histogram compared to a best-fit Gaussian distribution. This entropy is normalized by the relative entropy of a best-fit Laplacian distribution into a measure they refer to as Laplacian fractional entropy (LFE). They test the LFE on a set of 26 patients recalled at screening for which they have available full-field digital mammography (FFDM), digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), and dedicated breast CT (bCT) images as well as breast density scores and biopsy results.A study of LFE in FFDM comparing the raw "for-processing" transmission data from the device to log-converted density estimates and the processed "for-display" data shows that processing mammographic image data enhances the non-Gaussian content of the image. A check of the methodology using a Gaussian process with a power-law power spectrum shows relatively little bias from the finite extent of the region of interests used. A second study comparing LFE across FFDM, DBT, and bCT modalities shows that each maximized the non-Gaussian content of the image for different ranges of spatial frequency. FFDM is optimal at high spatial frequencies (>0.7 mm(-1)), DBT is optimal at mid-range frequencies (0.3-0.7 mm(-1)), and bCT is optimal at low spatial frequency (<0.3 mm(-1)). A third study of breast density in FFDM and bCT shows that LFE generally rises slightly going from the low-to moderate density, and then falls considerably at higher densities.Non-Gaussian statistical structure in breast images that is manifest in the responses of Gabor filters similar to receptive fields of the early visual system is dependent on how the image data are processed, the modality used to acquire the image, and the density of the breast tissue being imaged. Higher LFE corresponds with expected improvements from image processing and 3D imaging.

Project description:Artificial intelligence has emerged as a powerful computational tool to create artworks. One application is Neural Style Transfer, which allows to transfer the style of one image, such as a painting, onto the content of another image, such as a photograph. In the present study, we ask how Neural Style Transfer affects objective image properties and how beholders perceive the novel (style-transferred) stimuli. In order to focus on the subjective perception of artistic style, we minimized the confounding effect of cognitive processing by eliminating all representational content from the input images. To this aim, we transferred the styles of 25 diverse abstract paintings onto 150 colored random-phase patterns with six different Fourier spectral slopes. This procedure resulted in 150 style-transferred stimuli. We then computed eight statistical image properties (complexity, self-similarity, edge-orientation entropy, variances of neural network features, and color statistics) for each image. In a rating study, we asked participants to evaluate the images along three aesthetic dimensions (Pleasing, Harmonious, and Interesting). Results demonstrate that not only objective image properties, but also subjective aesthetic preferences transferred from the original artworks onto the style-transferred images. The image properties of the style-transferred images explain 50 - 69% of the variance in the ratings. In the multidimensional space of statistical image properties, participants considered style-transferred images to be more Pleasing and Interesting if they were closer to a "sweet spot" where traditional Western paintings (JenAesthetics dataset) are represented. We conclude that NST is a useful tool to create novel artistic stimuli that preserve the image properties of the input style images. In the novel stimuli, we found a strong relationship between statistical image properties and subjective ratings, suggesting a prominent role of perceptual processing in the aesthetic evaluation of abstract images.

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Statistical image properties of print advertisements, visual artworks and images of architecture.

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