Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dong, Zhitong, Li, Chao, Yu, Jie, Chen, Hao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12545
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918498279620608
author Dong, Zhitong
Li, Chao
Yu, Jie
Chen, Hao
author_facet Dong, Zhitong
Li, Chao
Yu, Jie
Chen, Hao
contents Aesthetic image cropping aims to enhance the aesthetic quality of an image by improving its composition through spatial cropping. Previous methods often rely on saliency prediction or retrieval augmentation, ignoring the task's core requirement: a deep understanding of composition and aesthetics. Consequently, saliency-based methods struggle to make compositional trade-offs in complex scenes, while retrieval-based methods blindly refer to similar cases, lacking adaptive reasoning for unique scenes. Both approaches fail to align their automated cropping results with those of human experts. To address the above issues, we propose a novel paradigm that reformulates aesthetic cropping as a multimodal reasoning task, aiming to activate the VLM's analytical and comprehension capabilities in aesthetics. We design a Compositional Reasoning and Optimizing Preference method (CROP) that directs the VLM to think like a professional photographer. It deconstructs a complex and subjective aesthetic problem into an "analysis-proposal-decision" process, reasoning step by step through the analysis of scene elements and compositional principles. Meanwhile, our expert preference alignment module makes the model's decision consistent with human expert aesthetics. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate our method's superiority and component effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12545
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CROP: Expert-Aligned Image Cropping via Compositional Reasoning and Optimizing Preference
Dong, Zhitong
Li, Chao
Yu, Jie
Chen, Hao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Aesthetic image cropping aims to enhance the aesthetic quality of an image by improving its composition through spatial cropping. Previous methods often rely on saliency prediction or retrieval augmentation, ignoring the task's core requirement: a deep understanding of composition and aesthetics. Consequently, saliency-based methods struggle to make compositional trade-offs in complex scenes, while retrieval-based methods blindly refer to similar cases, lacking adaptive reasoning for unique scenes. Both approaches fail to align their automated cropping results with those of human experts. To address the above issues, we propose a novel paradigm that reformulates aesthetic cropping as a multimodal reasoning task, aiming to activate the VLM's analytical and comprehension capabilities in aesthetics. We design a Compositional Reasoning and Optimizing Preference method (CROP) that directs the VLM to think like a professional photographer. It deconstructs a complex and subjective aesthetic problem into an "analysis-proposal-decision" process, reasoning step by step through the analysis of scene elements and compositional principles. Meanwhile, our expert preference alignment module makes the model's decision consistent with human expert aesthetics. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate our method's superiority and component effectiveness.
title CROP: Expert-Aligned Image Cropping via Compositional Reasoning and Optimizing Preference
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12545