How We Trained an Algorithm to Predict What Makes a Beautiful Photo

EyeEm's Head of R&D Appu Shaji explains how his team developed a deep learning technology that understands aesthetic taste and applies it to your photos. As a child I waited anxiously for the arrival of each new issue of National Geographic Magazine. The magazine had amazing stories from around the world, but it was the stunning photographs that really stood out to me. The colors, shadows and composition intrigued me, as well as a union of visual arrangement and storytelling. This childhood fascination with photographs sparked a curiosity to understand their behavior, nuances and semantics. Ultimately, this curiosity drove me to study computer vision, which has empowered me to develop systems for understanding images from a computational and scientific perspective.