Automatic Thumbnail Generation Based on Visual Representativeness and Foreground Recognizability

Jingwei Huang, Huarong Chen, Bin Wang, Stephen Lin

Abstract: We present an automatic thumbnail generation technique based on two essential considerations: how well they visually represent the original photograph, and how well the foreground can be recognized after the cropping and downsizing steps of thumbnailing. These factors, while important for the image indexing purpose of thumbnails, have largely been ignored in previous methods, which instead are designed to highlight salient content while disregarding the effects of downsizing. We propose a set of image features for modeling these two considerations of thumbnails, and learn how to balance their relative effects on thumbnail generation through training on image pairs composed of photographs and their corresponding thumbnails created by an expert photographer. Experiments show the effectiveness of this approach on a variety of images, as well as its advantages over related techniques.