Photo Composition Feedback and Enhancement - Exploiting Spatial Design Categories and the Notan Dark-Light Principle

Cameras on mobile phones are becoming the primary means of photo creation for common people. Because of the convenience of mobile phones, it is effortless to take snapshots and share with others. As a result, pictures are being created at a much faster pace. It is estimated that as many as one trillion photos will be taken in the year of 2015. Software tools that make it easier for average photographers to improve photo taking will likely have broad acceptance. Understanding visual aesthetics (Datta et al., 2006) can aid various applications including summarization of photo collections (Obrador et al., 2010), selection of high quality images for display (Fogarty et al., 2001), and extraction of aesthetically pleasing images for retrieval (Obrador et al., 2009). It can also be used to render feedback to the photographer on the aesthetics of his/her photographs. In order to make image aesthetic quality assessment more dynamic and to reach out to the general public with a practical perspective, we conducted research to develop new technologies that can provide on-site feedback to the photographers (Yao et al., 2012). We focused on feedback from a high-level composition perspective. Composition is the art of putting components together with conscious thoughts. In photography, it concerns the arrangement of various visual elements, such as line, color, texture, tone, and space. Composition is closely related