  To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that beauty is largely
subjective so varies from person to person. While the subjectivity view is
commonly held, there is also an objectivity view that seeks to measure beauty
or aesthetics in some quantitative manners. Christopher Alexander has long
discovered that beauty or coherence highly correlates to the number of
subsymmetries or substructures and demonstrated that there is a shared notion
of beauty - structural beauty - among people and even different peoples,
regardless of their faiths, cultures, and ethnicities. This notion of
structural beauty arises directly out of living structure or wholeness, a
physical and mathematical structure that underlies all space and matter. Based
on the concept of living structure, this paper develops an approach for
computing the structural beauty or life of an image (L) based on the number of
automatically derived substructures (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H). To
verify this approach, we conducted a series of case studies applied to eight
pairs of images including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock's
Blue Poles. We discovered among others that Blue Poles is more structurally
beautiful than the Mona Lisa, and traditional buildings are in general more
structurally beautiful than their modernist counterparts. This finding implies
that goodness of things or images is largely a matter of fact rather than an
opinion or personal preference as conventionally conceived. The research on
structural beauty has deep implications on many disciplines, where beauty or
aesthetics is a major concern such as image understanding and computer vision,
architecture and urban design, humanities and arts, neurophysiology, and
psychology.
  Keywords: Life; wholeness; figural goodness; head/tail breaks; computer
vision
