Abstract Aesthetic quality assessment for photographs is an important research topic since it can be used for a number of applications, such as image database management or image browsing. In 2012, the aesthetic visual analysis (AVA) dataset has been proposed. It has since then been used to train the majority of computational models of aesthetics assessment. We observe that AVA is mainly composed of competitive photographs which notion of aesthetics differs from other kinds of photographs, such as professional photographs. In this paper, we evaluate whether or not recent aesthetics assessment models generalize well and perform well over professional photographs. We noticed that the different models we tested behave differently on both categories, and therefore do not generalize well. Besides, we fine‐tuned one of the tested model using professional photographs and the results show that this fine‐tuning is effectively improving the coverage of the methods.

In stereoscopic displays, such as those used in VR/AR headsets, our eyes are presented with two different views. The disparity between the views is typically used to convey depth cues, but it could be also used to enhance image appearance. We devise a novel technique that takes advantage of binocular fusion to boost perceived local contrast and visual quality of images. Since the technique is based on fixed tone curves, it has negligible computational cost and it is well suited for real-time applications, such as VR rendering. To control the trade-off between contrast gain and binocular rivalry, we conduct a series of experiments to explain the factors that dominate rivalry perception in a dichoptic presentation where two images of different contrasts are displayed. With this new finding, we can effectively enhance contrast and control rivalry in mono- and stereoscopic images, and in VR rendering, as confirmed in validation experiments.