Summary:
This article is devoted to researching a flexible system to complete visual blends. Visual blends is an advanced graphic design technology designed to attract people’s attention. It combines two objects together, which has applications in many fields, because it can express information well. However, visual blends do not simply combine or paste the two pictures together. It need to combine the characteristics of the two images, and it also need to be able to separate the two images. The previous working methods have some drawbacks, such as assigning tasks to a work fixedly person. Therefore, the author of this paper proposes a new workflow that can achieve flexible visual blends. The workflow of the system decomposes the flow of integrated computing technology and human microtasks, so that users can collectively generate visual fusion through brainstorming, synthesis and iterative steps. The workflow includes: brainstorming, Finding Images, Annotate Images for Shape and Coverage, Matching Algorithm, Automatic Blend Synthesis and Evaluation.
Reflection:
Before reading each article, I will anticipate the method of the article from the title of the article. Also before reading this article, I am thinking about how to implement a flexible workflow for visual blends. I think that when combining two images to form a new image and complete a new idea, increasing the flexibility of the workflow requires a wider selection of pictures and the order of work that can be changed, for example, to determine the images then to achieve the purpose, or determine a purpose, and then find two images. But I have never thought about starting from the worker’s perspective, through the participation of more workers, to build a flexible workflow.
And, I think the more important benefit of introducing brainstorming is inspiring workers. Compared to the method I mentioned before, and combined with real life, when completing a creative task, inspiration is the most difficult to find. So I think this is indeed a very good way. The benefits of setting up the first step of the system as brainstorming are:
- Help workers better understand the purpose of the task, which is not limited to the purpose of the current task, and at the same time, the understanding of visual blends can also be improved.
- Inspire inspiration. In the multi-person work style, people can choose the tasks they want to do, and can look at the results of others, and even collaborate with each other, which is very helpful for the construction of ideas.
So I think that this system has improved the flexibility of inspiring ideas and work. At the same time, because of the introduction of annotations, merge two images by computers and the evaluation system, I think the quality can be guaranteed in all aspects. But I think there are some limitations, for example, the generation of the machine may not control some details, but I think that a good design must pay great attention to details.
Question:
- Do you think this system can realize a flexible workflow, or it is more inclined to a heuristic system.
- How the system should control the details of the images automatically synthesized by the machine
- What are the limitations of this system?
I really like your take on how brainstorming works towards inspiring workers. I agree that in any creative field, inspiration is hard to come by and having a step in a system workflow that facilitates this is truly beneficial.
With respect to your second question, I suppose the system could perhaps allow the users to set some parameters that would enable them to control the details of the auto synthesized images. This might provide some flexibility in this step as well.