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Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image

To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that beauty is largely subjective so varies from person to person. While the subjectivity view is commonly held, there is also an objectivity view that seeks to measure beauty or aesthetics in some quantitative manners. Christopher Alexander has...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jiang, Bin, de Rijke, Chris
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8321336/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34460674
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jimaging7050078
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author Jiang, Bin
de Rijke, Chris
author_facet Jiang, Bin
de Rijke, Chris
author_sort Jiang, Bin
collection PubMed
description To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that beauty is largely subjective so varies from person to person. While the subjectivity view is commonly held, there is also an objectivity view that seeks to measure beauty or aesthetics in some quantitative manners. Christopher Alexander has long discovered that beauty or coherence highly correlates to the number of subsymmetries or substructures and demonstrated that there is a shared notion of beauty—structural beauty—among people and even different peoples, regardless of their faiths, cultures, and ethnicities. This notion of structural beauty arises directly out of living structure or wholeness, a physical and mathematical structure that underlies all space and matter. Based on the concept of living structure, this paper develops an approach for computing the structural beauty or life of an image (L) based on the number of automatically derived substructures (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H). To verify this approach, we conducted a series of case studies applied to eight pairs of images including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. We discovered among others that Blue Poles is more structurally beautiful than the Mona Lisa, and traditional buildings are in general more structurally beautiful than their modernist counterparts. This finding implies that goodness of things or images is largely a matter of fact rather than an opinion or personal preference as conventionally conceived. The research on structural beauty has deep implications on many disciplines, where beauty or aesthetics is a major concern such as image understanding and computer vision, architecture and urban design, humanities and arts, neurophysiology, and psychology.
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spelling pubmed-83213362021-08-26 Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image Jiang, Bin de Rijke, Chris J Imaging Article To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that beauty is largely subjective so varies from person to person. While the subjectivity view is commonly held, there is also an objectivity view that seeks to measure beauty or aesthetics in some quantitative manners. Christopher Alexander has long discovered that beauty or coherence highly correlates to the number of subsymmetries or substructures and demonstrated that there is a shared notion of beauty—structural beauty—among people and even different peoples, regardless of their faiths, cultures, and ethnicities. This notion of structural beauty arises directly out of living structure or wholeness, a physical and mathematical structure that underlies all space and matter. Based on the concept of living structure, this paper develops an approach for computing the structural beauty or life of an image (L) based on the number of automatically derived substructures (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H). To verify this approach, we conducted a series of case studies applied to eight pairs of images including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. We discovered among others that Blue Poles is more structurally beautiful than the Mona Lisa, and traditional buildings are in general more structurally beautiful than their modernist counterparts. This finding implies that goodness of things or images is largely a matter of fact rather than an opinion or personal preference as conventionally conceived. The research on structural beauty has deep implications on many disciplines, where beauty or aesthetics is a major concern such as image understanding and computer vision, architecture and urban design, humanities and arts, neurophysiology, and psychology. MDPI 2021-04-23 /pmc/articles/PMC8321336/ /pubmed/34460674 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jimaging7050078 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Jiang, Bin
de Rijke, Chris
Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image
title Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image
title_full Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image
title_fullStr Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image
title_full_unstemmed Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image
title_short Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image
title_sort structural beauty: a structure-based computational approach to quantifying the beauty of an image
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8321336/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34460674
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jimaging7050078
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