# Human-centric Image Cropping with Partition-aware and Content-preserving Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10269 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10269/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04849/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00179/) (2019)
- [Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00651/) (2020)
- [Image Aesthetic Assessment: An Experimental Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00838/) (2016)
- [Reliable and Efficient Image Cropping: A Grid Anchor based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04441/) (2019)
- [Quantitative Analysis of Automatic Image Cropping Algorithms: A Dataset and Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01480/) (2017)
- [Grid Anchor based Image Cropping: A New Benchmark and An Efficient Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08989/) (2019)
- [Learning to Compose with Professional Photographs on the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00503/) (2017)
- [Image Cropping with Composition and Saliency Aware Aesthetic Score Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10492/) (2019)
- [Deep Cropping via Attention Box Prediction and Aesthetics Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08014/) (2017)
- [Fast-AT: Fast Automatic Thumbnail Generation using Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04811/) (2016)
- [Listwise View Ranking for Image Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05352/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Neural Network for Image Cropping by Learning Composition from Aesthetic Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01432/) (2019)
- [Camera View Adjustment Prediction for Improving Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07608/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Spatial-Semantic Collaborative Cropping for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08086/) (2024)
- [Learning Subject-Aware Cropping by Outpainting Professional Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12080/) (2023)
- [PhotoFramer: Multi-modal Image Composition Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00993/) (2025)
- [ProCrop: Learning Aesthetic Image Cropping from Professional Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22490/) (2025)
- [Venus: Benchmarking and Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models for Aesthetic Guidance and Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23980/) (2026)
- [Image Cropping under Design Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08892/) (2023)
- [ShutterMuse: Capture-Time Photography Guidance with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25763/) (2026)
- [Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping with Attention-Guided and Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04821/) (2026)
- [ShotCrop3: Cropping Human-Centric Images into Cinematic Triple-Shot Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05635/) (2026)
- [Discrete Annotation, Continuous Preference: Rethinking Supervision for Accurate and Generalizable Aesthetic Image Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00582/) (2026)
- [FrameLite: Decision-Oriented Aesthetic Cropping with a Compact Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17639/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image cropping aims to find visually appealing crops in an image, which is an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we consider a specific and practical application: human-centric image cropping, which focuses on the depiction of a person. To this end, we propose a human-centric image cropping method with two novel feature designs for the candidate crop: partition-aware feature and content-preserving feature. For partition-aware feature, we divide the whole image into nine partitions based on the human bounding box and treat different partitions in a candidate crop differently conditioned on the human information. For content-preserving feature, we predict a heatmap indicating the important content to be included in a good crop, and extract the geometric relation between the heatmap and a candidate crop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can perform favorably against state-of-the-art image cropping methods on human-centric image cropping task. Code is available at https://github.com/bcmi/Human-Centric-Image-Cropping.