HsiaoYuan Hsu

HsiaoYuan Hsu, Xiangteng He, Yuxin Peng et al.

Content-aware visual-textual presentation layout aims at arranging spatial space on the given canvas for pre-defined elements, including text, logo, and underlay, which is a key to automatic template-free creative graphic design. In practical applications, e.g., poster designs, the canvas is originally non-empty, and both inter-element relationships as well as inter-layer relationships should be concerned when generating a proper layout. A few recent works deal with them simultaneously, but they still suffer from poor graphic performance, such as a lack of layout variety or spatial non-alignment. Since content-aware visual-textual presentation layout is a novel task, we first construct a new dataset named PosterLayout, which consists of 9,974 poster-layout pairs and 905 images, i.e., non-empty canvases. It is more challenging and useful for greater layout variety, domain diversity, and content diversity. Then, we propose design sequence formation (DSF) that reorganizes elements in layouts to imitate the design processes of human designers, and a novel CNN-LSTM-based conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is presented to generate proper layouts. Specifically, the discriminator is design-sequence-aware and will supervise the "design" process of the generator. Experimental results verify the usefulness of the new benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves the best performance by generating suitable layouts for diverse canvases.

HsiaoYuan Hsu, Yuxin Peng

In AI-empowered poster design, content-aware layout generation is crucial for the on-image arrangement of visual-textual elements, e.g., logo, text, and underlay. To perceive the background images, existing work demanded a high parameter count that far exceeds the size of available training data, which has impeded the model's real-time performance and generalization ability. To address these challenges, we proposed a patch-level data summarization and augmentation approach, vividly named Scan-and-Print. Specifically, the scan procedure selects only the patches suitable for placing element vertices to perform fine-grained perception efficiently. Then, the print procedure mixes up the patches and vertices across two image-layout pairs to synthesize over 100% new samples in each epoch while preserving their plausibility. Besides, to facilitate the vertex-level operations, a vertex-based layout representation is introduced. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmarks demonstrated that Scan-and-Print can generate visually appealing layouts with state-of-the-art quality while dramatically reducing computational bottleneck by 95.2%.