# Detecting Cultural Differences in News Video Thumbnails via Computational Aesthetics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21912 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21912/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Tag2Text: Guiding Vision-Language Model via Image Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05657/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth More than a Thousand Favorites: Surfacing the Hidden Beauty of Flickr Pictures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03358/) (2015)
- [The Beauty of Capturing Faces: Rating the Quality of Digital Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.07304/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Image Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11616/) (2021)
- [Towards Visualization Thumbnail Designs that Entice Reading Data-driven Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17051/) (2023)
- [Predicting beauty, liking, and aesthetic quality: A comparative analysis of image databases for visual aesthetics research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00984/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a two-step approach for detecting differences in the style of images across sources of differing cultural affinity, where images are first clustered into finer visual themes based on content before their aesthetic features are compared. We test this approach on 2,400 YouTube video thumbnails taken equally from two U.S. and two Chinese YouTube channels, and relating equally to COVID-19 and the Ukraine conflict. Our results suggest that while Chinese thumbnails are less formal and more candid, U.S. channels tend to use more deliberate, proper photographs as thumbnails. In particular, U.S. thumbnails are less colorful, more saturated, darker, more finely detailed, less symmetric, sparser, less varied, and more up close and personal than Chinese thumbnails. We suggest that most of these differences reflect cultural preferences, and that our methods and observations can serve as a baseline against which suspected visual propaganda can be computed and compared.