Evaluating Art by MeasuringComplexity

18 November 2014

Eelco den Heijer

Introduction

• Autonomous Evolutionary Art

• Evolving art, images; using an aesthetic measure as the fitness function

• Complexity of the image is (only) one aspect of aesthetic appeal

• Relation between Art and Complexity is unclear

Aesthetic Measures

• Compute aspects of beauty

• Information Complexity, Image Complexity, Processing Complexity

• Colour Harmony

• Symmetry & Balance

• Colour gradients

• Contrast

Shannon Entropy

• Calculate entropy of the intensity of the pixels of an image

• Liveliness of an image

• Rigau et al, 2008 - Informational aesthetics measures. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 28(2):24–34, 2008

Fractal Dimension

• Approximate self-similarity

• Use box-counting method

• Very difficult to ‘satisfy’ with our representation & EC parameters

Machado/ Cardoso

• Calculate Image Complexity (IC) and Processing Complexity (PC)

• “Images that are visually complex, but are processed easily have the highest aesthetic value”

• Penousal Machado and Amílcar Cardoso. Computing aesthetics. In Proceedings of the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, SBIA-98, pages 219–229. Springer- Verlag, 1998.

Machado/ Cardoso (2)

• Image complexity

• RMS(I) = difference in pixels between original image and compressed image (how well can you compress an image)

• Uses JPEG compressor, 75% quality setting

Machado/ Cardoso (3)• Processing Complexity

• Calculates complexity at ‘multiple time points’

• Divide image into 4 equal parts, calculate processing complexity for each part

• Estimate the processing complexity using

• Fractal compression (Machado & Cardoso)

• JPEG 2000 compression (den Heijer & Eiben)

• Run-Length Encoding (Atkins et al)

Facticity

• “Entropy and Kolmogorov complexity do not necessarily measure the interestingness of a system of a data set”

• Describes the amount of meaningful information of a dataset

• Pieter W. Adriaans. Between order and chaos: The quest for meaningful information. Theory Comput. Syst., 45(4):650–674, 2009

Discussion

• The use of simple complexity estimation tools is merely the beginning in calculating aesthetic appreciation

• How does the brain process complexity?

• And how is this linked to aesthetic value?

• Processing fluency theory (Reber, 2004)

• We probably need better models of human visual processing

Questions?

eelcodenheijer@gmail.com