Learning to Learn Cropping Models for Different Aspect Ratio Requirements

Image cropping aims at improving the framing of an image by removing its extraneous outer areas, which is widely used in the photography and printing industry. In some cases, the aspect ratio of cropping results is specified depending on some conditions. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning (learning to learn) based aspect ratio specified image cropping method called Mars, which can generate cropping results of different expected aspect ratios. In the proposed method, a base model and two meta-learners are obtained during the training stage. Given an aspect ratio in the test stage, a new model with new parameters can be generated from the base model. Specifically, the two meta-learners predict the parameters of the base model based on the given aspect ratio. The learning process of the proposed method is learning how to learn cropping models for different aspect ratio requirements, which is a typical meta-learning process. In the experiments, the proposed method is evaluated on three datasets and outperforms most state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed. In addition, both the intermediate and final results show that the proposed model can predict different cropping windows for an image depending on different aspect ratio requirements.