Event-enabled intelligent asset selection and grouping for photobook creation

The process of creating a photo product, such as a photobook, calendar or collage, from a large personal image collection requires intensive user effort. The primary goal of the current research was to develop an end-to-end solution to the problem of photo product generation that enables the user to complete the process with minimal edits, where the system intelligently selects assets and groups them before presenting the output to the user. The automation is driven by metadata extracted both from individual images as well as from sets of assets in a collection. In particular, we use an automatically detected event hierarchy to establish meaningful groupings in the assets, and to determine an appropriate grouping and pagination for the final product. We propose a novel intermediate construct, called a storyboard, which can be translated to different product types without recomputing the underlying metadata. In addition to chronological storyboards, we also describe a novel hybrid storyboard that joins chronological image presentation with groups of images of a common theme. A pagination algorithm uses the information in the storyboard and the product constraints to generate a product. Finally, the user is provided with a metadata-driven editing mechanism that makes it easy to change the auto-populated product. Given that the proposed system envisions user interaction in creating the final product, user studies are conducted to judge the usefulness of the system, where consumers use the system to generate a photobook with their own images.