Oldenburg Computer Science Series

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll,
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sebastian Lehnhoff (Hrsg.)

Philipp Sandhaus

Analysis, Retrieval and Layout for Digital Photobooks

Digital photos are the primary means for many people to capture the memory to personal events like owns own wedding, the steps of ones own child or a nice holiday trip. In times of digital photography where a photo is taken at practically no costs we are often overwhelmed by the thousands of photos taken each year which makes it hard to find the ones which are really meaningful. A common way of organizing and presenting important photos are photo albums or nowadays their digital counterpart photobooks. The main problems when compiling such photobooks are (a) picking the photos which are really important and (b) presenting them in a way which best conveys the underlying stories. A meaningful selection is influenced by many criteria: The photos should be aesthetically pleasing and thus unsharp, taken with the wrong exposure or on other ways bad shots should be avoided. On the other side, the story behind the photos should be reflected as good as possible by the selection. In the resulting photobook layout these selected photos should be placed both structured semantically reasonable and visually pleasing. These are tasks which, due to the high amount a manual effort, are often avoided and thus millions of photos end up residing unseen in digital shoeboxes such as hard drives and flash drives.

This book provides a comprehensive method of solving the problem of semi-automatic creation of digital photobooks. It follows a holistic approach covering all relevant processes and develops a system for the automatic retrieval for and layout of photobooks. The overall process is divided up into several steps: photo analysis, selection, augmentation and layout in analogy to the manual human photobook design workflow. The driving factor is the user and the user's needs. For this the book starts by thoroughly analyzing how users select photos and how they arrange these photos in photobooks based on thousands of real-world photobooks. The results are used for the development of a semi-automatic system for the selection and layout of personal photos in photobooks which are both aesthetically pleasing best convey the underlying personal stories.

Bd. 28, XII, 160 S., Edewecht 2013, € 49,80
ISBN-13 978-3-95599-002-2