Automatic comic-like image layout system preserving image order and important regions

In this paper, we present a practical and automatic comic-like image layout system for event photos or event movies. We focus on the comic-like layout with cropping. The comic-like layouts allow viewers to track events in time sequential order like comic books, in which event images are cropped and arranged in panels from top left to bottom right on a screen so that the resultant layout has variety of image shapes and gives a pleasant impression. The main drawback of the conventional method is that an important region such as a face or a salient object area is sometimes cropped. In order to avoid excessive cropping of important regions while maintaining the image order, our system achieves adaptive layout to input images by generating all possible templates suitable for comic and deciding appropriate templates based on our proposed layout evaluation. In the demo, we will show that our full automatic system generates comic-like layouts immediately. Furthermore, the system allows a user to select his/her favorite layout from the multiple ones with different looks.