Automatic Photo Composition

As showed in the video below, the current drone from Zero Zero Robotics already has the functionality of letting the user select how they want to frame the photo and the drone will automatically fly to the corresponding position to take the shot. Our big motivation of the project is to further improve that auto composition process to make photos with higher aesthetics quality. More specifically, the flexible control of the drone provides a lot of perspective changes and different composition possibilities. So we want to first explore the possibility of training the drone to automatically fly to a position that can result in a pretty solid photo. But as we all know, concise control of drone is usually difficult. Even human photographer with a camera, it’s not easy to get a perfect shot in one try. For example, sometimes you might find unexpected object appear in your photo after taking it. Then some post-processing with cropping can come into play to further adjust and improve the photo composition. So we break down the problem into two parts, the first part is auto-framing, which is given image inputs at each drone state, we want to output a series of drone controls that can Lead to an end state with photo of high aesthetic quality. The second part is auto-cropping, which is given an image with arbitrary size, we want to search for the optimal cropping box that can achieve the highest aesthetic quality.