Human-centric Image Cropping with Partition-aware and Content-preserving Features
This work addresses a specific application for photographers and designers by improving image cropping focused on human depiction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing cropping techniques.
The paper tackles human-centric image cropping by proposing a method with partition-aware and content-preserving features, achieving favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods in experiments.
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.