TransView: Inside, Outside, and Across the Cropping View Boundaries

We show that relation modeling between visual elements matters in cropping view recommendation. Cropping view recommendation addresses the problem of image recomposition conditioned on the composition quality and the ranking of views (cropped sub-regions). This task is challenging because the visual difference is subtle when a visual element is reserved or removed. Existing methods represent visual elements by extracting region-based convolutional features inside and outside the cropping view boundaries, without probing a fundamental question: why some visual elements are of interest or of discard? In this work, we observe that the relation between different visual elements significantly affects their relative positions to the desired cropping view, and such relation can be characterized by the attraction inside/outside the cropping view boundaries and the repulsion across the boundaries. By instantiating a transformer-based solution that represents visual elements as visual words and that models the dependencies between visual words, we report not only state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks, but also interesting visualizations that depict the attraction and repulsion between visual elements, which may shed light on what makes for effective cropping view recommendation.