Employing Aesthetic Principles for Automatic Photo Book Layout

Photos are a common way of preserving our personal memories. The visual souvenir of a personal event is often composed into a photo collage or the pages of a photo album. Today we find many tools to help users creating such compositions by different tools for authoring photo compositions. Some template-based approaches generate nice presentations, however, come mostly with limited design variations. Creating complex and fancy designs for, e.g., a personal photo book, still demands design and composition skills to achieve results that are really pleasing to the eye – skills which many users simply lack. Professional designers instead would follow general design principles such as spatial layout rules, symmetry, balance among the element as well color schemes and harmony. In this paper, we propose an approach to deliver principles of design and composition to the end user by embedding it into an automatic composition application. We identify and analyze common design and composition principles and transfer these to the automatic creation of pleasant photo compositions by employing genetic algorithms. In contrast to other approaches, we strictly base our design system on common design principles, consider additional media types besides text in the photo book and specifically take the content of photos into account. Our approach is both implemented in a web-based rich media application and a tool for the automatic transformation from blogs into photo books.