Vismantic: Meaning-making with Images

This paper presents Vismantic, a semi-automatic system generating proposals of visual composition (visual ideas) in order to express specific meanings. It implements a process of developing visual solutions from ‘what to say’ to ‘how to say’, which requires both conceptual and visual creativity. In particular, Vismantic extends our previous work on using conceptual knowledge to find diverse visual representations of abstract concepts, with the capacity of combining two images in three ways, including juxtaposition, replacement and fusion. In an informal evaluation consisting of five communication tasks, Vismantic demonstrated the potential of producing a number of expressive and diverse ideas, among which many are surprising. Our analysis of the generated images confirms that visual meaningmaking is a subtle interaction between all elements in a picture, for which Vismantic demands more visual semantic knowledge, higher image analysis and synthesis skills, and the ability of interpreting composed images, in order to deliver more ideas that make sense.