Find Beauty in the Rare: Contrastive Composition Feature Clustering for Nontrivial Cropping Box Regression

TL;DR

This paper introduces a contrastive clustering method to improve image cropping by better capturing rare and nontrivial composition patterns, leading to more diverse and aesthetically pleasing results.

Contribution

It proposes Contrastive Composition Clustering (C2C), a novel approach that enhances cropping models by emphasizing rare composition patterns through contrastive feature regularization.

Findings

Outperforms prior methods in cropping quality

Improves generalization to rare composition patterns

Visualizations demonstrate better pattern separation

Abstract

Automatic image cropping algorithms aim to recompose images like human-being photographers by generating the cropping boxes with improved composition quality. Cropping box regression approaches learn the beauty of composition from annotated cropping boxes. However, the bias of annotations leads to quasi-trivial recomposing results, which has an obvious tendency to the average location of training samples. The crux of this predicament is that the task is naively treated as a box regression problem, where rare samples might be dominated by normal samples, and the composition patterns of rare samples are not well exploited. Observing that similar composition patterns tend to be shared by the cropping boundaries annotated nearly, we argue to find the beauty of composition from the rare samples by clustering the samples with similar cropping boundary annotations, ie, similar composition patterns. We propose a novel Contrastive Composition Clustering (C2C) to regularize the composition features by contrasting dynamically established similar and dissimilar pairs. In this way, common composition patterns of multiple images can be better summarized, which especially benefits the rare samples and endows our model with better generalizability to render nontrivial results. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our model compared with prior arts. We also illustrate the philosophy of our design with an interesting analytical visualization.