Cuteness recognition and localization in the photos of animals

Abstract

Among the flourishing amount of photos in the social media websites, "cute" images of animals are particularly attractive to the Internet users. This paper considers building an automatic model which can distinguish cute images from non-cute ones. To make the recognition results more interpretable, a lot of efforts are made to find which part of the animal appears attractive to the human users. To validate the success of our proposed method, we collect three new datasets of different animals, i.e., cats, dogs, and rabbits with both cute and non-cute images. Our model obtains promising performance in distinguishing cute images from non-cute ones. Moreover, it outperforms the classical models with not only better recognition accuracy, but also more intuitive localization of the cuteness in the images. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: (1) We collect new datasets for cuteness recognition, (2) We extend the powerful Fisher Vector representation to localize cute part in the animal recognition, and (3) Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method can recognize cute animals of cats, dogs, and rabbits.