Modeling Perspective Effects in Photographic Composition

Zihan Zhou, Siqiong He, Jia Li and James Z. Wang
The Pennsylvania State University
Abstract:

Automatic understanding of photo composition is a valuable technology in multiple areas including digital photography, multimedia advertising, entertainment, and image retrieval. In this paper, we propose a method to model geometrically the compositional effects of linear perspective. Comparing with existing methods which have focused on basic rules of design such as simplicity, visual balance, golden ratio, and the rule of thirds, our new quantitative model is more comprehensive whenever perspective is relevant. We first develop a new algorithm that achieves accurate segmentation by integrating classic photometric cues with a new geometric cue inspired by perspective geometry in a hierarchical segmentation framework. We further show how these cues can be used directly to detect the dominant vanishing point in an image without extracting any line segments, a technique with implications for multimedia applications beyond this work. Finally, we demonstrate an interesting application of the proposed method for providing on-site composition feedback through an image retrieval system.


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Citation: Zihan Zhou, Siqiong He, Jia Li and James Z. Wang, ``Modeling Perspective Effects in Photographic Composition,'' Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference, pp. 301-310, Brisbane, Australia, ACM, October 2015.

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Last Modified: August 5, 2015
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