Aesthetic image cropping meets VLP: Enhancing good while reducing bad

Abstract

Aesthetic Image Cropping (AIC) enhances the visual appeal of an image by adjusting its composition and aesthetic elements. People make these adjustments based on these elements, aiming to enhance appealing aspects while minimizing detrimental factors. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel approach called CLIPCropping, which simulates the human decision-making process in AIC. CLIPCropping leverages Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) to align visual perception with textual description. It consists of three branches: composition embedding, aesthetic embedding, and image cropping. The composition embedding branch learns principles based on Composition Knowledge Embedding (CKE), while the aesthetic embedding branch learns principles based on Aesthetic Knowledge Embedding (AKE). The image cropping branch evaluates the quality of candidate crops by aggregating knowledge from CKE and AKE; an MLP produces the best result. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets — GAICD-1236, GAICD-3336, and FCDB — show that CLIPCropping outperforms state-of-the-art methods and provides insightful interpretations.