Phil Cheatle

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.

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.

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.