An End-to-End Neural Network for Image Cropping by Learning Composition from Aesthetic Photos

As one of the fundamental techniques for image editing, image cropping discards unrelevant contents and remains the pleasing portions of the image to enhance the overall composition and achieve better visual/aesthetic perception. In this paper, we primarily focus on improving the accuracy of automatic image cropping, and on further exploring its potential in public datasets with high efficiency. From this respect, we propose a deep learning based framework to learn the objects composition from photos with high aesthetic qualities, where an anchor region is detected through a convolutional neural network (CNN) with the Gaussian kernel to maintain the interested objects' integrity. This initial detected anchor area is then fed into a light weighted regression network to obtain the final cropping result. Unlike the conventional methods that multiple candidates are proposed and evaluated iteratively, only a single anchor region is produced in our model, which is mapped to the final output directly. Thus, low computational resources are required for the proposed approach. The experimental results on the public datasets show that both cropping accuracy and efficiency achieve the state-ofthe-art performances.