This paper addresses a challenging and novel problem in 2D shape cloud visualization: arranging irregular 2D shapes on an irregular canvas to minimize gaps and overlaps while emphasizing critical shapes by displaying them in larger sizes. The concept of a shape cloud is inspired by word clouds, which are widely used in visualization research to aesthetically summarize textual datasets by highlighting significant words with larger font sizes. We extend this concept to images, introducing shape clouds as a powerful and expressive visualization tool, guided by the principle that "a picture is worth a thousand words. Despite the potential of this approach, solutions in this domain remain largely unexplored." To bridge this gap, we develop a 2D shape cloud collage framework that compactly arranges 2D shapes, emphasizing important objects with larger sizes, analogous to the principles of word clouds. This task presents unique challenges, as existing 2D shape layout methods are not designed for scalable irregular packing. Applying these methods often results in suboptimal layouts, such as excessive empty spaces or inaccurate representations of the underlying data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel layout framework that leverages recent advances in differentiable optimization. Specifically, we formulate the irregular packing problem as an optimization task, modeling the object arrangement process as a differentiable pipeline. This approach enables fast and accurate end-to-end optimization, producing high-quality layouts. Experimental results show that our system efficiently creates visually appealing and high-quality shape clouds on arbitrary canvas shapes, outperforming existing methods.

Deploying style transfer methods on resource-constrained devices is challenging, which limits their real-world applicability. To tackle this issue, we propose using pruning techniques to accelerate various visual style transfer methods. We argue that typical pruning methods may not be well-suited for style transfer methods and present an iterative correlation-based channel pruning (ICCP) strategy for encoder-transform-decoder-based image/video style transfer models. The correlation-based channel regularization preserves the feature distributions for content and style references, and the iterative pruning strategy prevents layer collapse when pruning on the encoder-decoder structure. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed ICCP can generate visual competitive results compared to SOTA style transfer methods and significantly reduces the number of parameters (at least 70K) and inference time. Model is available at https://github.com/wukx-wukx/ICCP.

Video holds significance in computer graphics applications. Because of the heterogeneous of digital devices, retargeting videos becomes an essential function to enhance user viewing experience in such applications. In the research of video retargeting, preserving the relevant visual content in videos, avoiding flicking, and processing time are the vital challenges. Extending image retargeting techniques to the video domain is challenging due to the high running time. Prior work of video retargeting mainly utilizes time-consuming preprocessing to analyze frames. Plus, being tolerant of different video content, avoiding important objects from shrinking, and the ability to play with arbitrary ratios are the limitations that need to be resolved in these systems requiring investigation. In this paper, we present an end-to-end RETVI method to retarget videos to arbitrary aspect ratios. We eliminate the computational bottleneck in the conventional approaches by designing RETVI with two modules, content feature analyzer (CFA) and adaptive deforming estimator (ADE). The extensive experiments and evaluations show that our system outperforms previous work in quality and running time.

If the video has long been mentioned as a widespread visualization form, the animation sequence in the video is mentioned as storytelling for people. Producing an animation requires intensive human labor from skilled professional artists to obtain plausible animation in both content and motion direction, incredibly for animations with complex content, multiple moving objects, and dense movement. This article presents an interactive framework to generate new sequences according to the users' preference on the starting frame. The critical contrast of our approach versus prior work and existing commercial applications is that novel sequences with arbitrary starting frame are produced by our system with a consistent degree in both content and motion direction. To achieve this effectively, we first learn the feature correlation on the frameset of the given video through a proposed network called RSFNet. Then, we develop a novel path-finding algorithm, SDPF, which formulates the knowledge of motion directions of the source video to estimate the smooth and plausible sequences. The extensive experiments show that our framework can produce new animations on the cartoon and natural scenes and advance prior works and commercial applications to enable users to obtain more predictable results.

Image collage is a very useful tool for visualizing an image collection. Most of the existing methods and commercial applications for generating image collages are designed on simple shapes, such as rectangular and circular layouts. This greatly limits the use of image collages in some artistic and creative settings. Although there are some methods that can generate irregularly-shaped image collages, they often suffer from severe image overlapping and excessive blank space. This prevents such methods from being effective information communication tools. In this article, we present a shape slicing algorithm and an optimization scheme that can create image collages of arbitrary shapes in an informative and visually pleasing manner given an input shape and an image collection. To overcome the challenge of irregular shapes, we propose a novel algorithm, called Shape-Aware Slicing, which partitions the input shape into cells based on medial axis and binary slicing tree. Shape-Aware Slicing,which is designed specifically for irregular shapes, takes human perception and shape structure into account to generate visually pleasing partitions. Then, the layout is optimized by analyzing input images with the goal of maximizing the total salient regions of the images. To evaluate our method, we conduct extensive experiments and compare our results against previous work. The evaluations show that our proposed algorithm can efficiently arrange image collections on irregular shapes and create visually superior results than prior work and existing commercial tools.

Changing the style of an image/video while preserving its content is a crucial criterion to access a new neural style transfer algorithm. However, it is very challenging to transfer a new map art style to a certain video in which “content” comprises a map background and animation objects. In this article, we present a novel comprehensive system that solves the problems in transferring map art style in such video. Our system takes as input an arbitrary video, a map image, and an off-the-shelf map art image. It then generates an artistic video without damaging the functionality of the map and the consistency in details. To solve this challenge, we propose a novel network, Map Art Video Network (MAViNet), the tailored objective functions, and a rich training set with rich animation contents and different map structures. We have evaluated our method on various challenging cases and many comparisons with those of the related works. Our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and meets the mentioned criteria in this research domain.

From a single still image, a looping video could be generated by imparting subtle motion to objects in the image. The results are a hybrid of photography and video. They contain gentle motion in some objects, while the rest of the image remains still. Existing techniques are successful in animating such images. However, there are still some drawbacks that need to be investigated, such as too-large computation time necessary to retrieve the matched videos or the challenges of controlling the desired motion not only in terms of a single region but also in terms of consistency in regions. In this work, we address these issues by proposing an interactive system with a novel warping method. The key idea of our approach is to utilize user’s annotations to impart motion to certain objects. With two proposed phases in terms of preserve-curve-warping and cycle warping, a looping video is generated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method via various experimental challenging results and evaluations. We show that with a simple and lightweight method, our system is able to deal with animating a still image’s problems and results in realistic motion and appealing videos. In addition, using our proposed system, it is easy to create plausible animation using simple user annotations without referencing the video database or machine learning models and allows ordinary users with minimal expertise to produce compelling results.

Wire sculptures are objects sculpted by the use of wires. In this article, we propose practical methods to create 3D virtual wire sculptural art from a given 3D model. In contrast, most of the previous 3D wire art results are reconstructed from input 2D wire art images. Artists usually tend to design their wire art with a single wire if possible. If not possible, they try to create it with the least number of wires. To follow this general design trend, our proposed method generates 3D virtual wire art with the minimum number of continuous wire lines. To achieve this goal, we first adopt a greedy approach to extract important edges of a given 3D model. These extracted important edges become the basis for the subsequent lines to roughly represent the shape of the input model. Then, we connect them with the minimum number of continuous wire lines by the order obtained by optimally solving a traveling salesman problem with some constraints. Finally, we smooth the obtained 3D wires to simulate the real 3D wire results by artists. In addition, we also provide a user interface to control the winding of wires by their design preference. Finally, we experimentally show our 3D virtual wire results and evaluate these created results. As a result, the proposed method is computed effectively and interactively, and results are appealing and comparable to real 3D wire art work.