Abstract:Computational aesthetics has become an active research area in recent years, but current works mainly focus on aesthetic evaluation of photographs and oil paintings. Chinese wash painting differs significantly from photograph and oil painting in visual features because it uses ink blended with water and a few colors to depict objects. This paper proposes a framework for computational aesthetic evaluation of Chinese wash paintings. The framework first extracts several features in color, composition and texture from Chinese wash paintings, and then uses 60 Chinese paintings by the famous artist Qi Baishi to verify it. Specifically, human ratings of aesthetics are conducted on these paintings and human evaluated aesthetics are regressed on calculated feature variables to obtain the computational aesthetic evaluation model. Experimental results show that the Pearson correlation coefficient between the computational aesthetic evaluation results and human aesthetic evaluation results is 0.949. This paper provides a reference framework for aesthetic evaluation of Chinese wash paintings, and also furthers the understanding of the relationship between human aesthetics and computational visual features extracted from Chinese wash paintings.