Optimizing Photo Composition

Ligang Liu	Renjie Chen	Lior Wolf	Daniel Cohen-Or
Zhejiang University		Tel-Aviv University

Eurographics 2010

Teaser: Optimizing the aesthetics of the original photograph in (a) by our approach leads to the new image composition shown in (c). (b)shows the cropping result of the approach of [Santella et al. 2006]. The aesthetic scores are shown in (d). Our result in (c) obtains higher aesthetic score than (a) and (b). Note that (c) is not just a cropping of (a) as it contains much more cloud than the cropping frame. RT(rule of thirds), DA(diagonal), VB(visual balance), and SZ(region size) are components of the objective function.

Abstract

Aesthetic images evoke an emotional response that transcends mere visual appreciation. In this work we develop a novel computational means for evaluating the composition aesthetics of a given image based on measuring several well-grounded composition guidelines. A compound operator of crop-and-retarget is employed to change the relative position of salient regions in the image and thus to modify the composition aesthetics of the image. We propose an optimization method for automatically producing a maximally-aesthetic version of the input image. We validate the performance of the method and show its effectiveness in a variety of experiments.

Keywords

Image retargeting, image resizing, computational aesthetics, composition, optimization

Paper

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Video

AVI download

Results

Upper row: input photos; Lower row: output aesthetic photos.

Presentation

Coming soon...

Additional

1. More optimized composition results
2. More validation results
3. More comparison results with the other approaches

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the Flickr.com users for sharing their images which were used in this paper. We are thankful to anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. We thank Binbin Lin, Lei Zhang, Zhonggui Chen, Wei Zhu, Tao Ju, and Ross Sowell for helpful discussions and for assisting in making the video. This work is supported by the joint grant of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Microsoft Research Asia (60776799) and the 973 National Key Basic Research Foundation of China (No. 2009CB320801), and also by grants from the Israel Science Foundation founded by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

BibTex

@article {Liu:EG2010,
    title = {Optimizing Photo Composition},
    author = {Ligang Liu and Renjie Chen and Lior Wolf and Daniel Cohen-Or}
    journal = {Computer Graphic Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics)},
    volume = {29},
    number = {2},
    pages = {},
    year = {2010}
}