almost every person has an
1 for natural environments. in addition, most people find healthy or
2 locations with high biodiversity more beautiful and
4 pleasing than environmentally degraded locations. in a study which
5 '
6' 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
7, philosophers and art historians around the world have searched for universally
8 9 for
3 principles -- in other words, a way to
10 describe things like beauty and ugliness. the development of a powerful new computational approach will now allow for a more comprehensive
11 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
12 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
13 and color
14. they then created a computer program capable of assessing these features in images and used it to
15 more than 2,000 random photographic images of coral reefs from around the world. the program produced an aesthetic score for each reef
16.
the study, 'can we measure beauty? computational
17 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.