Khan, Shehroz S.Vogel, DanielDouglas Cunningham and Donald House2013-10-222013-10-222012978-3-905674-43-91816-0859https://doi.org/10.2312/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH12/055-062We propose and demonstrate a strategy to quantify aesthetic quality in photographs. Our approach is to develop a small set of classification features by tuning general compositional principles to a targeted image domain where saliency can be better understood. We demonstrate this strategy with photographic portraits of individuals, but it can be extended to other domains. Our technique leverages a refined method of using templates as spatial composition feature look-up tables. Compared to the traditional approach using a large set of global and local features extracted with little salient knowledge, classifiers using features extracted with our approach are better predictors of human aesthetic judgments.