Social game Epitome versus automatic visual analysis

With the rapid growth of digital photography, sharing of photos with friends and family has become very popular. When people share their photos, they usually organize them in albums according to events or places. To tell the story of some important events in one's life, it is desirable to have an efficient summarization tool which can help people to get a quick overview of an album containing huge number of photos. In this paper, we analyze an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game "Epitome'" as a Facebook application. This social game can collect research data and, at the same time, it provides a collage or a cover photo of the user's photo album, while, at the same time, the user enjoys playing the game. As a benchmark comparison to this game, we performed automatic visual analysis considering several state-of-the-art features

Epitome - A Social Game for Photo Album Summarization

In this paper, we propose an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game "Epitome" for mobile phones. Our approach to album summarization consists of two games: "Select the Best!" and "Split it!". The goal of the first game is to allow a user to select the most representative photo of a reduced set of images, while in the second game, the user has to split the reduced set into two distinct parts. As it could be time-consuming to look at a huge collection of photos on a mobile phone, it is more enjoyable and pleasant to show only a limited number of images which can be fit into one mobile screen. The results obtained in these games are combined to produce a summarization and are then compared with the results of other users. As a final result, a unique summarization sequence of photos is determined. The determined sequence of photos can be used to create a collage of one album or a cover for an album. The proof of concept of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of experiments on several photo collections

Optimisation of automatic variable graphic layout and imposition

Prednosti automatizacije u grafičkoj pripremi primarno leže u povećanju efikasnosti u produkciji pripreme za tisak i montaže, posebice u poslovima koji se ponavljaju. Ostale prednosti su smanjivanje troškova pošto se više posla može odraditi s manje zaposlenika. Jedan od načina izrade automatizacije je i skriptiranje. Mogu se izvršavati kratke skripte koje odrađuju samo jedan zadatak, kompleksne skripte koje obavljaju višestruke zadatke, pa sve do onih koje automatiziraju cijeli izdavački proces. Kod skripti koje obavljaju kompleksne zadatke vrijeme izvršavanja može biti dugotrajno. U radu je opisana skripta koja ostvaruje automatizaciju izrade varijabilne grafičke pripreme, montaže i numeriranja za digitalni tisak. Kvantitativno su određene dobivena automatizacija i ušteda u vremenu korištenjem automatiziranog procesa. Osim učinkom automatizacije na stvarni proces grafičke pripreme ovaj rad bavi se i optimizacijom napisane skripte kako bi se skratilo vrijeme njezinog izvršavanja i utvrdili čimbenici koji utječu na skriptna vremena.The benefit of automation in graphic prepress lies primarily in an increase of efficiency in the production of layout and imposition of repetitive tasks by shortening lead time. Another benefit is cost reduction, since more work can be done with fewer staff members. One way of automating is by using scripts. Scripts can be written to execute just one task, complex scripts can perform multiple tasks and some scripts automate the entire publishing process. With scripts that execute complex tasks execution period can be time consuming. This paper describes the script that was made to automate variable data layout, imposition and to number digital printing. Quantitative research was carried out in this paper to determine achieved automation and time reduction by using automated processes. This paper also deals with written script optimization in order to shorten the time of its execution and to identify factors that affect the script execution time

Epitomize Your Photos

With the rapid growth of digital photography, sharing of photos with friends and family has become very popular. When people share their photos, they usually organize them in albums according to events or places. To tell the story of some important events in one's life, it is desirable to have an efficient summarization tool which can help people to receive a quick overview of an album containing huge number of photos. In this paper, we present and analyze an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game ``Epitome'' as a Facebook application. This social game can collect research data and, at the same time, it provides a collage or a cover photo of the user's photo album, while the user enjoys playing the game. The proof of concept of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of experiments on several photo albums. As a benchmark comparison to this game, we perform automatic visual analysis considering several state-of-the-art features. We also evaluate the usability of the game by making use of a questionnaire on several subjects who played "Epitome" game. Furthermore, we address privacy issues concerning shared photos in Facebook applications

Media aesthetics based multimedia storytelling.

Since the earliest of times, humans have been interested in recording their life experiences, for future reference and for storytelling purposes. This task of recording experiences --i.e., both image and video capture-- has never before in history been as easy as it is today. This is creating a digital information overload that is becoming a great concern for the people that are trying to preserve their life experiences. As high-resolution digital still and video cameras become increasingly pervasive, unprecedented amounts of multimedia, are being downloaded to personal hard drives, and also uploaded to online social networks on a daily basis. The work presented in this dissertation is a contribution in the area of multimedia organization, as well as automatic selection of media for storytelling purposes, which eases the human task of summarizing a collection of images or videos in order to be shared with other people. As opposed to some prior art in this area, we have taken an approach in which neither user generated tags nor comments --that describe the photographs, either in their local or on-line repositories-- are taken into account, and also no user interaction with the algorithms is expected. We take an image analysis approach where both the context images --e.g. images from online social networks to which the image stories are going to be uploaded--, and the collection images --i.e., the collection of images or videos that needs to be summarized into a story--, are analyzed using image processing algorithms. This allows us to extract relevant metadata that can be used in the summarization process. Multimedia-storytellers usually follow three main steps when preparing their stories: first they choose the main story characters, the main events to describe, and finally from these media sub-groups, they choose the media based on their relevance to the story as well as based on their aesthetic value. Therefore, one of the main contributions of our work has been the design of computational models --both regression based, as well as classification based-- that correlate well with human perception of the aesthetic value of images and videos. These computational aesthetics models have been integrated into automatic selection algorithms for multimedia storytelling, which are another important contribution of our work. A human centric approach has been used in all experiments where it was feasible, and also in order to assess the final summarization results, i.e., humans are always the final judges of our algorithms, either by inspecting the aesthetic quality of the media, or by inspecting the final story generated by our algorithms. We are aware that a perfect automatically generated story summary is very hard to obtain, given the many subjective factors that play a role in such a creative process; rather, the presented approach should be seen as a first step in the storytelling creative process which removes some of the ground work that would be tedious and time consuming for the user. Overall, the main contributions of this work can be capitalized in three: (1) new media aesthetics models for both images and videos that correlate with human perception, (2) new scalable multimedia collection structures that ease the process of media summarization, and finally, (3) new media selection algorithms that are optimized for multimedia storytelling purposes.Postprint (published version

ADAPTIVE PHOTO COLLECTION PAGE LAYOUT

This paper presents a new photo collection page layout that attempts to maximize page coverage without having photos overlap. Layout is based on a hierarchical partition of the page, which provides explicit control over the aspect ratios and relative areas of the photos. We present an efficient method for finding a hierarchical partition that produces a photo arrangement suitable for the shape of the page. Rather than relying on a stochastic search we employ a deterministic procedure that mimics the natural process of adding photos to the layout one by one. 1. INTRODUCTION AND PRIO