Do Color Palettes Influence Image Aesthetics?

Each season the team at the Pantone Color Institute creates the Pantone Fashion Color Trend Report; a color overview highlighting the top colors fashion designers showing at NY Fashion Week will be featuring in their collections for the upcoming season. But, now, the same institute has noticed that social media is helping to shape the current and trendy color palettes. Designers and brands know that color is a powerful tool for communicating with consumers, creating both conscious and unconscious perceptions, and social networks are now a powerful communication tool. Therefore, it is important to study social networks in order to exploit their powerful and discover what the consumers like more. In social networks it is possible to find images that have got a high number of likes. Can we assume that the number of likes, and therefore the aesthetics rate of an image is related to the color palette in the image? If yes, then, it is possible to find social fashion color trends. The paper study the correlation between image aesthetics and color preference, by studying the relation between the aesthetic rate of two datasets of images-images from the AVA dataset [1], and images from the AADB dataset [2]- and the rate obtained following an automatic rate method constructed using as basis the COLOURlovers(1) dataset.