Photo collage aims to automatically arrange multiple photos on a given canvas with high aesthetic quality. Existing methods are based mainly on handcrafted feature optimization, which cannot adequately capture high-level human aesthetic senses. Deep learning provides a promising way, but owing to the complexity of collage and lack of training data, a solution has yet to be found. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline for automatic generation of aspect ratio specified collage and the reinforcement learning technique is introduced in non-content-preserving collage. Inspired by manual collages, we model the collage generation as a sequential decision process to adjust spatial positions, orientation angles, placement order and the global layout. To instruct the agent to improve both the overall layout and local details, the reward function is specially designed for collage, considering subjective and objective factors. To overcome the lack of training data, we pretrain our deep aesthetic network on a large scale image aesthetic dataset (CPC) for general aesthetic feature extraction and propose an attention fusion module for structural collage feature representation. We test our model against competing methods on movie and image datasets and our results outperform others in several quality evaluations. Further user studies are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness.

Image collage task aims to create an informative and visual-aesthetic visual summarization for an image collection. While several recent works exploit tree-based algorithm to preserve image content better, all of them resort to hand-crafted adjustment rules to optimize the collage tree structure, leading to the failure of fully exploring the structure space of collage tree. Our key idea is to soften the discrete tree structure space into a continuous probability space. We propose SoftCollage, a novel method that employs a neural-based differentiable probabilistic tree generator to produce the probability distribution of correlation-preserving collage tree conditioned on deep image feature, aspect ratio and canvas size. The differentiable characteristic allows us to formulate the tree-based collage generation as a differentiable process and directly exploit gradient to optimize the collage layout in the level of probability space in an end-to-end manner. To facilitate image collage research, we propose AIC, a large-scale public-available annotated dataset for image collage evaluation. Extensive experiments on the introduced dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method. Data and codes are available at https://github.com/ChineseYjh/SoftCollage.