Technical Reports

HPL-2009-372

Cheatle, Phil
HP Laboratories

HPL-2009-372

Keyword(s): Image analysis, Cropping, Saliency

Abstract: Image cropping is an important aspect of creating aesthetically pleasing web pages and repurposing content for different web or printed output layouts. Cropping provides both the possibility of improving the composition of the image, and also the ability to change the aspect ratio of the image to suit the layout design needs of different document or web page formats. This paper presents a method for aesthetically cropping images on the basis of their content. Underlying the approach is a novel segmentation-based saliency method which identifies some regions as "distractions", as an alternative to the convention al "foreground" and "background" classifications. Distractions are a particular problem with typical consumer photos found on social networking websites such as FaceBook, Flickr etc. Automatic cropping is achieved by identifying the main subject area of the image and then using an optimization search to expand this to form an aesthetically pleasing crop. Evaluation of aesthetic functions like auto-crop is difficult as there is no single correct solution. A further contribution of this paper is an automated evaluation method which goes some way towards handling the complexity of aesthetic assessment. This allows crop algorithms to be easily evaluated against a large test set.

9 Pages

External Posting Date: December 17, 2009 [Abstract Only]. Approved for External Publication - External Copyright Consideration
Internal Posting Date: December 17, 2009 [Fulltext]

Back to Index