Visual Composition as Optimisation

Camera planning is the problem of positioning a camera within a world, such that the resulting image has some predefined set of visual properties. We are developing a graphical presentation planning system which incorporates CAMPLAN, a camera planning subsystem for polygonal graphics. CAMPLAN uses a genetic algorithm to optimise the camera with respect to a set of image objectives (properties of the image). The motivations for CAMPLAN are outlined and an informal evaluation of the system is presented in which we show how successfully more restrictive objectives can impose stylistic regularity over similar graphical scenes. We conclude with a discussion of our current work and outline future directions for graphical presentation planning.