Saliency based aesthetic cut of digital images

Abstract

Aesthetic cut of photos is a process well known to professional photographers. It consists of cutting the original photo to remove less relevant parts close to the borders leaving in this way the interesting subjects in a position that is perceived by the observer as more pleasant. In this paper we propose a saliency based technique to automatically perform aesthetic cut in images. We use a standard method to estimate the saliency map and propose some post processing on the map to make it more suitable for our scope. We then apply a greedy algorithm to determine the cut (i.e. the most important part of the original image) both in the cases of free and fixed aspect ratio. Experimental results are reported showing how the cut resulting from our technique compares to some state of the art retargeting and cropping techniques. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.