Weakly- and Self-Supervised Learning for Content-Aware Deep Image Retargeting

This paper proposes a weakly- and self-supervised deep convolutional neural network (WSSDCNN) for content-aware image retargeting. Our network takes a source image and a target aspect ratio, and then directly outputs a retargeted image. Retargeting is performed through a shift map, which is a pixel-wise mapping from the source to the target grid. Our method implicitly learns an attention map, which leads to a content-aware shift map for image retargeting. As a result, discriminative parts in an image are preserved, while background regions are adjusted seamlessly. In the training phase, pairs of an image and its image-level annotation are used to compute content and structure losses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for a retargeting application with insightful analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures. To appear in ICCV 2017, Spotlight Presentatio

Learning Visual Importance for Graphic Designs and Data Visualizations

Knowing where people look and click on visual designs can provide clues about how the designs are perceived, and where the most important or relevant content lies. The most important content of a visual design can be used for effective summarization or to facilitate retrieval from a database. We present automated models that predict the relative importance of different elements in data visualizations and graphic designs. Our models are neural networks trained on human clicks and importance annotations on hundreds of designs. We collected a new dataset of crowdsourced importance, and analyzed the predictions of our models with respect to ground truth importance and human eye movements. We demonstrate how such predictions of importance can be used for automatic design retargeting and thumbnailing. User studies with hundreds of MTurk participants validate that, with limited post-processing, our importance-driven applications are on par with, or outperform, current state-of-the-art methods, including natural image saliency. We also provide a demonstration of how our importance predictions can be built into interactive design tools to offer immediate feedback during the design process

Supervised Deep Learning for Content-Aware Image Retargeting with Fourier Convolutions

Image retargeting aims to alter the size of the image with attention to the contents. One of the main obstacles to training deep learning models for image retargeting is the need for a vast labeled dataset. Labeled datasets are unavailable for training deep learning models in the image retargeting tasks. As a result, we present a new supervised approach for training deep learning models. We use the original images as ground truth and create inputs for the model by resizing and cropping the original images. A second challenge is generating different image sizes in inference time. However, regular convolutional neural networks cannot generate images of different sizes than the input image. To address this issue, we introduced a new method for supervised learning. In our approach, a mask is generated to show the desired size and location of the object. Then the mask and the input image are fed to the network. Comparing image retargeting methods and our proposed method demonstrates the model's ability to produce high-quality retargeted images. Afterward, we compute the image quality assessment score for each output image based on different techniques and illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure