Visual perception driven collage synthesis

A collage is a composite artwork made from the spatial layout of multiple pictures on a canvas, collected from the Internet or user photographs. Collages, usually made by skilled artists, involve a complex manual process, especially when searching for component pictures and adjusting their spatial layout to meet artistic requirements. In this paper, we present a visual perception driven method for automatically synthesizing visually pleasing collages. Unlike previous works, we focus on how to design a collage layout which not only provides easy access to the theme of the overall image, but also conforms to human visual perception. To achieve this goal, we formulate the generation of collages as a mapping problem: given a canvas image, first, compute a saliency map for it and a vector field for each sub-region of it. Second, using a divide-and-conquer strategy, generate a series of patch sets from the canvas image, where the salient map and the vector field are used to determine each patch's size and direction respectively. Third, construct a Gestalt-based energy function to choose the most visually pleasing and orderly patch set as the final layout. Finally, using a semantic-color metric, map the picture set to the patch set to generate the final collage. Extensive experimental and user study results show that this method can generate visual pleasing collages.