Image Collage on Arbitrary Shape via Shape-Aware Slicing and
  Optimization
Dong-Yi Wu Thi-Ngoc-Hanh Le Sheng-Yi Yao Yun-Chen Lin Tong-Yee Lee
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 paper, 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.