An Intelligent System for Overlaying Texts on Background Images Based on Computational Aesthetics

A computational model on the aesthetic appeal of colored text-overlaid images is proposed and experimentally investigated. Five photos were used to compose a set of test images overlaid with a paragraph of Chinese texts as the stimuli. The positions of the text overlay were determined by varying the balance in order to validate computational aesthetic quantification algorithms with subjective ratings. The stimuli were rated by 10 subjects in an experiment using the ratio-scale magnitude estimation method against a benchmark image for each photo. Results from the experiment show that subjects are adept at judging balance in both the horizontal and vertical directions. The experiment established a relationship between a higher averaged visual balance and the aesthetic appeal of text-overlaid images. Based on the result, we have implemented a prototype system that compute the optimal position for automatically overlaying a paragraph of texts on a given background image.