Joint Probability Distribution Regression for Image Cropping

Image cropping aims at locating a candidate (rectangle region) with the highest aesthetic quality in professional photography. One solution of the previous methods is to generate a large number of candidates and then filter them, which leads to low efficiency. Another idea directly regresses the candidate coordinates to speed up but ignores the aesthetic subjectivity of the candidate’s evaluation, limiting the model’s performance. In this paper, we present an Aesthetic and Composition joint Probability Distribution regression Network (ACPD-Net) to explicitly investigate the process of generating the candidate with a joint probability distribution paradigm to improve the performance of cropping results in an efficient way. The joint probability distribution paradigm between location and size branch can identify the subjective aesthetic region and satisfy the objective composition rules in an end-to-end manner. Our method has been tested on the FCDB and FLMS datasets, which shows the superiority of ACPD-Net. The code is available at https://github.com/flyingbird93/ACPD-Net.