1. A method for determining the aesthetic quality of an input image, comprising: extracting a set of local features from the input image, the extracting comprising, for each of a set of patches of the image, generating a local descriptor based on low level features of pixels in the patch; with a processor, generating an image representation which describes the distribution of the local features, the generating of the image representation comprising modeling the local descriptors using a probabilistic model, whereby the input image representation comprises probabilistic model component values for a set of probabilistic model components; and with a classifier system, determining an aesthetic quality of the input image based on the computed image representation.