David Neil Slatter

MagicPhotobook: designer inspired, user perfected photo albums

Computer-assisted photo album creation continues to be a challenging application as it requires integrated technical solutions to many difficult problems. Effective solutions must leverage both design knowledge and image understanding algorithms to automate time-consuming tasks like image selection, grouping, cropping, layout and background selection. At the same time, they should allow the user to cater to personal tastes by fine-tuning aspects of album appearance. MagicPhotobook is a photobook authoring system that takes steps in these directions by providing advances over prior solutions in the following areas: automatic image selection and theme-based image grouping; dynamic page layout; automatic cropping; automatic background selection; design-preserving background artwork transformation; and a simple yet powerful user interface for personalization.

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.

Web-based magazine design for self publishers

Short run printing technology and web services such as MagCloud provide new opportunities for long-tail magazine publishing. They enable self publishers to supply magazines to a wide range of communities, including groups that are too small to be viable as target communities for conventional publishers. In a Web 2.0 world where users constantly discover new services and where they may be infrequent patrons of any single service, it is unreasonable to expect users to learn the complex service behaviors. Furthermore, we want to open up publishing opportunities to novices who are unlikely to have prior experience of publishing and who lack design expertise. Magazine design automation is an ambitious goal, but recent progress with another web service, Autophotobook, proves that some level of automation of publication design is feasible. This paper describes our current research effort to extend the automation capabilities of Autophotobook to address the issues of magazine design so that we can provide a service to support professional-quality self publishing by novice users for a wide range of community types and sizes.

Layout hierarchies for interactive design reuse

The advent of viable long tail & self-publishing solutions ([1], [2]) has spawned new requirements for automatic layout technologies. In most cases these attempt to lay out whole pages, spreads or documents based on complete content data. In this paper we introduce a new approach to document layout based on the principle of interactive design reuse, in which a new design is created from an existing high quality design via a sequence of simple steps to establish the final content. Based on our experience building such a system we propose a method of building layout hierarchies and discuss the implementation of editing operations appropriate to this new paradigm.

Faces from the web: automatic selection and composition of media for casual screen consumption and printed artwork

Web image search engines facilitate the production of image sets in which faces appear. Many people enjoy producing and sharing media collections of this type and generating new images or video experiences. Skilled practitioners produce visually appealing artifacts from such collections but few users have the time or creative ability to do so. The problem is to automatically create an image or ambient experience which sustains interest. A full solution requires agreements with copyright holders and input from graphics designers. We address the underlying technical problems of extraction and composition. We describe an automatic system that identifies regions containing human faces in each image of an image set resulting from a web search. The face regions are composed into dynamically synthesized multilayer graphical backgrounds. The aesthetic aspects of the composition are controlled by active templates. These aspects include face size and positioning but also face identity and number of faces in a group. The output structure is multi layer supporting both the generation of static images and video consisting of transitions between the compositions.