Almost every person has an appreciation¹ for natural environments. In addition, most people find healthy or pristine² locations with high biodiversity more beautiful and aesthetically⁴ pleasing than environmentally degraded locations. In a study which computed⁵ 'aesthetics⁶' as it relates to coral reefs, a multidisciplinary group of researchers have shown that an objective computational analysis of photographic images can be used to assess the health of a coral reef. Since antiquity⁷, philosophers and art historians around the world have searched for universally valid⁸ criteria⁹ for aesthetic³ principles -- in other words, a way to quantitatively¹⁰ describe things like beauty and ugliness. The development of a powerful new computational approach will now allow for a more comprehensive assessment¹¹ of what people find aesthetically pleasing. 

 

Working together, mathematics, biology, and art history researchers from San Diego State University, the Getty Research Institute, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography created a tool to computationally measure the aesthetic appearance of coral reefs. The results demonstrate that objective visual cues generated from random¹² photographic images can be used to reliably assess both the beauty and health of coral reefs around the world.

 

The collaborators compiled and modified a list of 109 visual features that can be used to assess the aesthetic appeal of an image, such as the relative size, color, and distribution of discernable objects within the image, as well as texture¹³ and color intensity¹⁴. They then created a computer program capable of assessing these features in images and used it to analyze¹⁵ more than 2,000 random photographic images of coral reefs from around the world. The program produced an aesthetic score for each reef ecosystem¹⁶. 

 

The study, 'Can we measure beauty? Computational evaluation¹⁷ of coral reef aesthetics,' was published Nov. 10th 2015 in the scientific open access journal PeerJ. The findings show striking similarities between the aesthetic score produced for random reef images and the health of the respective reef ecosystem as evaluated by reef scientists. 

 

"Our results suggest that our perception of aesthetics is well-aligned with healthy, thriving ecosystems," said Andreas Haas, an SDSU postdoctoral scholar and primary researcher of the study.

点击收听单词发音