C. Brian Atkins

Mixed-initiative photo collage authoring

Creating an artifact that captures the story or memory from a large photo collection is a difficult task, because the tools available are either too difficult to learn, or oversimplified to the point that they lack flexibility. Individual techniques have been developed to automate parts of the selection-editing-composition cycle, but relatively little has been done to strike the right overall balance between the fully automatic and the fully manual. In this paper, we present miCollage, which attempts to piece together individual technologies to create a compelling collage authoring experience. The system consists of three main components. In the selection component, the system can make proactive suggestions about which photos to add to the collage as well as help the user to find similar or related photos. In the editing component, the system applies automatic cropping and enhancement to the images. In the layout component, the system suggests alternative layouts but is still able to accommodate manual changes, while satisfying various spatial constraints. The user interface connects the components seamlessly, allowing a best of both worlds between fully manual and fully automatic collage authoring.

Adaptive photo collection page layout

This paper presents a new photo collection page layout that attempts to maximize page coverage without having photos overlap. Layout is based on a hierarchical page partition, which provides explicit control over the aspect ratios and relative areas of the photos. We present an efficient method for finding a partition that produces a photo arrangement suitable for the shape of the page. Rather than relying on a stochastic search we employ a deterministic procedure that mimics the natural process of adding photos to the layout one by one.

AutoPhotobook: using technology to streamline photobook creation

The design of a computer-assisted photobook authoring solution continues to be a challenging task, since consumers want four things from such an application: simplicity, quality, customizability and speed. Our AutoPhotobook solution uses technology to enable a system that preserves all four characteristics, providing high quality custom photobooks while keeping complexity and authoring time modest. We leverage both design knowledge and image understanding algorithms to automate time-consuming tasks like image selection, grouping, cropping and layout. This streamlines the initial creation phase, so the user is never stuck staring at a blank page wondering where to begin. Our composition engine then allows users to easily edit the book: adding, swapping or moving objects, exploring different page layouts and themes, and even dynamically adjusting the aspect ratio of the final book. Our technologies enable even novice users to easily create aesthetically pleasing photobooks that tell their underlying stories. AutoPhotobook provides advances over prior solutions in the following areas: automatic image selection and theme-based image grouping; dynamic page layout including text support; automatic cropping; design-preserving background artwork transformation; and a simple yet powerful user interface for personalization. In this paper, we present these technologies and illustrate how they work together to improve the photobook authoring process.

Blocked recursive image composition with exclusion zones

Photo collages are a popular and powerful storytelling mechanism. They are often enhanced with background artwork that sets the theme for the story. However, layout algorithms for photo collage creation typically do not take this artwork into account, which can result in collages where photos overlay important artwork elements. To address this, we extend our previous Blocked Recursive Image Composition (BRIC) method to allow any number of photos to be automatically arranged around preexisting exclusion zones on a canvas (exBRIC). We first generate candidate binary splitting trees to partition the canvas into regions that accommodate both photos and exclusion zones. We use a Cassowary constraint solver to ensure that the desired exclusion zones are not covered by photos. Finally, photo areas, exclusion zones and layout symmetry are evaluated to select the best candidate. This method provides flexible, dynamic and integrated photo layout with background artwork.

iPhotobook: creating photo books on mobile devices

The amount of photo that is captured and stored with mobile devices is growing rapidly. We regularly see traditional desktop multimedia applications being ported to mobile devices. However, less often do we see novel interaction mechanism being developed to effectively deal with the physical limitations of the display and input of such devices. We built a mobile application called iPhotobook that enables users to create and edit photo books on iPhones. The application leveraged image analysis algorithms to automate user tasks of photo selection, grouping, editing and layout that would be difficult to accomplish without a large screen input. In this paper, we present these technologies and more importantly illustrate how they work together seamlessly with a gesture based user interface that creates a fun photo book authoring experience. Although the iPhone is our platform of choice and photo book creation is our target application, our innovations on UI design and automation algorithms may well be generalized to other small screen devices and applied to other mobile media applications.

An investigation of document aesthetics for web-to-print repurposing of small-medium business marketing collateral

Businesses have traditionally relied on different types of media to communicate with existing and potential customers. With the emergence of the Web, the relation between the use of print and electronic media has continually evolved. In this paper, we investigate one possible scenario that combines the use of the Web and print. Specifically, we consider the scenario where a small- or medium-sized business (SMB) has an existing web site from which they wish to pull content to create a print piece. Our assumption is that the web site was developed by a professional designer, working in conjunction with the business owner or marketing team, and that it contains a rich assembly of content that is presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Our goal is to understand the process that a designer would follow to create an effective and aesthetically pleasing print piece. We are particularly interested to understand the choices made by the designer with respect to placement and size of the text and graphic elements on the page. Toward this end, we conducted an experiment in which professional designers worked with SMBs to create print pieces from their respective web pages. In this paper, we report our findings from this experiment, and examine the underlying conclusions regarding the resulting document aesthetics in the context of the existing design, and engineering and computer science literatures that address this topic

Video analysis for browsing and printing

More and more home videos have been generated with the ever growing popularity of digital cameras and camcorders. In many cases of home video, a photo, whether capturing a moment or a scene within the video, provides a complementary representation to the video. In this paper, a complete solution of video to photo is presented. The intent of the user is first derived by analyzing video motions. Then, photos are produced accordingly from the video. They can be keyframes at video highlights, panorama of the scene, or high-resolution frames. Methods and results of camera motion mining, intelligent keyframe extraction, video frame stitching and super-resolution enhancement are described.

Templated recursive image composition

With the proliferation of image acquisition and consumption, there is an increasing need for solutions that help ordinary people create high quality image composites. In most solutions today, image layouts are provided as fixed templates, which offer the potential of visually diverse layout sets. However, the layout choices are limited to those selected in advance by the template designer; and the library may not support a particular image count, aspect ratio set or spatial distribution. To ameliorate these shortcomings, we propose an image layout framework called Templated Recursive Image Composition. TRIC is template-based in that every layout is based on a template specification. However, TRIC is also generative in that virtually any image set can be accommodated as long as there is at least one image for every region in the template specification. Constraints ensure respect for image aspect ratios; for spacing in the layout interior; and for proportions and placement of sublayouts corresponding to regions in the template specification. We present a description of TRIC, results that demonstrate its versatility, and a user study that supports its acceptability.

From video to photo albums: digital publishing workflow for automatic album creation

The revolution in consumer electronics for capturing video has been followed by an explosion of video content. However, meaningful consumption models of such rich media for nonprofessional users are still emerging. In contrast to those of video cameras, the consumption models for output of still cameras have been long established and are considerably simpler. The output of a still camera is an image of sufficiently high quality and high resolution for a good quality production on paper. Due to ease of use, mobility, high quality and simplicity paper photographs are still incomparable in terms of overall human experience. On the other hand, video content by itself is not as easy to use. Consumption of video content requires computers and/or video display devices and so cannot be instantaneously displayed or shared. Rendition on paper is much more complex for video content compared to still camera images. In contrast with the simplicity of usage of still cameras, video camera output has to be edited on computer, key frames with good visual quality have to be manually extracted, digitally edited and prepared for printing before getting usable good quality photographs. Due to complexity of the video content, users often prefer to take still pictures instead of recording video clips. In this paper we describe an approach to construct an end-to-end digital publishing workflow system that automatically composes visually appealing photo albums with high quality photographic images from video content input.