Picture Collage

In this paper, we address a novel problem of automatically creating a picture collage from a group of images. Picture collage is a kind of visual image summary -- to arrange all input images on a given canvas, allowing overlay, to maximize visible visual information. We formulate the picture collage creation problem in a Bayesian framework. The salient regions of each image are firstly extracted and represented as a set of weighted rectangles. Then, the image arrangement is formulated as a Maximum a Posterior (MAP) problem such that the output picture collage shows as many visible salient regions (without being overlaid by others) from all images as possible. Moreover, a very efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is designed for the optimization. Applications to desktop image browsing and image search result summarization demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Jingdong Wang, Long Quan, Jian Sun, Xiaoou Tang, Heung-Yeung Shum
• Keywords: Computer Vision, CVPR 2006, Output Picture Collage, Picture Collage, Picture Collage Creation, Visible Salient Regions, Visual Image Summary