Human Perception of Visual Information

Recent years have witnessed important advancements in our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of subjective properties of visual information, such as aesthetics, memorability, or induced emotions. Concurrently, computational models of objective visual properties such as semantic labelling and geometric relationships have made significant breakthroughs using the latest achievements in machine learning and large-scale data collection. There has also been limited but important work exploiting these breakthroughs to improve computational modelling of subjective visual properties. The time is ripe to explore how advances in both of these fields of study can be mutually enriching and lead to further progress. This book combines perspectives from psychology and machine learning to showcase a new, unified understanding of how images and videos influence high-level visual perception - particularly interestingness, affective values and emotions, aesthetic values, memorability, novelty, complexity, visual composition and stylistic attributes, and creativity.