ViDA 3D: Towards a View-based Dataset for Aesthetic prediction on 3D models

We present the ongoing effort to build the first benchmark dataset for aestethic prediction on 3D models. The dataset is built on top of Sketchfab, a popular platform for 3D content sharing. In our dataset, the visual 3D content is aligned with aesthetics-related metadata: each 3D model is associated with a number of snapshots taken from different camera positions, the number of times the model has been viewed in-between its upload and its retrieval, the number of likes the model got, and the tags and comments received from users. The metadata provide precious supervisory information for data-driven research on 3D visual attractiveness and preference prediction. The paper contribution is twofold. First, we introduce an interactive platform for visualizing data about Sketchfab. We report a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of numerical scores (views and likes collected by 3D models) and textual information (tags and comments) for different 3D object categories. The analysis of the content of Sketchfab provided us the base for selecting a reasoned subset of annotated models. The second contribution is the first version of the ViDA 3D dataset, which contains the full set of content required for data-driven approaches to 3D aesthetic analysis. While similar datasets are available for images, to our knowledge this is the first attempt to create a benchmark for aestethic prediction for 3D models. We believe our dataset can be a great resource to boost research on this hot and far-from-solved problem.