Constraint-Based Automatic Placement for Scene Composition

The layout of large scenes can be a time–consuming and tedious task. In most current systems, the user must position each of the objects by hand, one at a time. This paper presents a constraint–based automatic placement system, which allows the user to quickly and easily lay out complex scenes. The system uses a combination of automatically– generated placement constraints, pseudo–physics, and a semantic database to guide the automatic placement of objects. Existing scenes can quickly be rearranged simply by reweighting the placement preferences. We show that the system enables a user to lay out a complex scene of 300 objects in less than 10 minutes.