DIGITAL COLLAGE

Digital Collage

Digital Collage

Introduction

Digital cameras are quickly replacing traditional film cameras for the average photographer. With a digital camera it is possible to capture, store and transfer more photographs than ever before. While it is simple to acquire digital photographs, new techniques need to be developed in order to organize, share, and generally interact with large collections of digital photographs. A collage is a composite of a several different media elements combined to form an artistic creation. The media elements used in a collage vary by artistic preference and the message the collage is meant to convey. A very popular media to use is images or photographs. For the purposes of this proposal, I will refer to a collage, and photo collage interchangeably as I am not considering collages designed with other media elements. A collage is a unique medium, in that it can convey an overall sense of the artist's intent, and/or several messages within a single two-dimensional picture (Bongwon, 2003, 48).

In this sense, the photo collage is able to convey an overall sense of the photographs in a collection (or a subset of that collection). The photo elements in a collage present a sampling over all the elements in all of the photographs in the collection. If the sampling is performed in an intelligent manner, that sampling in turn can represent a summary of the photographs in the collection. In other words, we can say that a collage provides an importance sampling of the set of photographs. In such a sampling scheme, photos are taken based on their perceived importance relative to other photographs in the collection. In the simplest case, this importance sampling can be a human choosing their favorite photos. If a collage is well designed with certain properties in mind, then I believe that the collage can be used as a tool for dealing with large photograph collections. Some of those properties are:

• Use an importance sampling to summarize the collection. As discussed above, if the photographs that were selected by an importance sampling, then the resulting collage acts as a summary of the photo collection.

• Comprised of elements of photographs, rather than entire photographs. If elements, rather than whole photographs, are used then more elements can be included in the final collage without increasing the size of the physical layout.

• No implied or forced ordering of elements. The collage should convey a gestalt impression the photographic set, and should be taken in at once.

• Can be thematic. We may want to restrict the sampling to only pick from photographs that have specific properties. In this way we further reduce the size of the collection and give a topic to the resulting collage.

It is my thesis that a system which produces collages with the above mentioned properties can be used as an interface to large collections of photographs. The following is a list of some of the ways that such a scheme may be ...