Jian Fan

Automatic design of magazine covers

In this paper, we propose a system for automatic design of magazine covers that quantifies a number of concepts from art and aesthetics. Our solution to automatic design of this type of media has been shaped by input from professional designers, magazine art directors and editorial boards, and journalists. Consequently, a number of principles in design and rules in designing magazine covers are delineated. Several techniques are derived and employed in order to quantify and implement these principles and rules in the format of a software framework. At this stage, our framework divides the task of design into three main modules: layout of magazine cover elements, choice of color for masthead and cover lines, and typography of cover lines. Feedback from professional designers on our designs suggests that our results are congruent with their intuition.

Title identification of web article pages using HTML and visual features

Extracting informative content from Web article pages has many applications such as printing and content reuse. Title is a very significant and unique component of an article. However, identifying the true title is not an easy problem even for human readers. In this paper, we present a title identification method that takes into account of several features including the title field of the HTML page and HTML tag of a DOM node as well as font size and horizontal alignment. We tested our method on a ground truth data set consisting of 1993 pages from 98 web sites and achieved 97.5% accuracy, about 20% above a baseline method based on only the font size.

PageSpark: an E-magazine reader with enhanced reading experiences on handheld devices

In this paper we present PageSpark, a system that automatically converts static magazine content to interactive and engaging reading apps on handheld reading devices. PageSpark enhances the reading experience in three general aspects: page layout reorganization, page element interactions and page transitions. We explored and implemented several design variations in each aspect with the prototype running on the iPad. Participants from our initial user study showed strong interest of using PageSpark over existing magazine reading apps.

Mobile document scanning and copying

In this paper, we show a multimedia system for processing mobile camera captured documents. Using a client application on a mobile phone, a user can capture a document image, and send the image to a processing server so that the document image can be restored using automatic perspective and illumination corrections. The restored document can then be sent to a web-connected printer to complete the copying task.

Text extraction from web images

Web images constitute an important part of web document and become a powerful medium of expression, especially for the images containing text. The text embedded in web images often carry semantic information related to layout and content of the pages. Statistics show that there is a significant need to detect and recognize text from web images. In this paper, we first give a short review of these methods proposed for text detection and recognition in web images; then a framework to extract from web images is presented, including stages of text localization and recognition. In text localization stage, localization method is applied to generate text candidates and a two-stage strategy is utilized to select text candidates, then text regions are localized using a coarse-to-fine text lines extraction algorithm. For text recognition, two text region binarization methods have been proposed to improve the performance of text recognition in web images. Experimental results for text localization and recognition prove the effectiveness of these methods. Additionally, a recognition evaluation for text regions in web images has been conducted for benchmark.