Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping with Attention-Guided and Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator

2026-08-05

AI Summary

Existing image cropping methods overly emphasize salient regions while neglecting the global structural relationships among primary compositional elements, leading to suboptimal aesthetic evaluation. To address this limitation, this work proposes the GAFIC framework, which introduces an Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (AGFF) mechanism to jointly model local details and global composition. Furthermore, a Global Alignment Cropping Evaluator (GACE) is designed to assess the consistency between candidate crops and the image’s overall structure, complemented by a multi-scale ranking loss to refine cropping scores. Notably, the method operates without altering pixel content, instead selecting the optimal cropping region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GAFIC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both the GAIC and CPC datasets, achieving superior performance in terms of accuracy, stability, and batch-processing efficiency.

Abstract

Image cropping aims to improve image aesthetics by preserving important content within an appropriately composed region. However, most existing methods focus primarily on salient regions and therefore have limited sensitivity to the global relationships among the main image components. To address this limitation, we propose Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping (GAFIC), which consists of an Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (AGFF) and a Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator (GACE). AGFF aggregates the importance of local regions to construct a global representation that captures both image structure and local details. GACE aligns candidate crop features with this global representation, enabling crop evaluation to remain sensitive to boundary changes. We further combine three ranking losses across multiple scales to obtain accurate and stable crop scores. Extensive experiments on the GAIC and CPC datasets demonstrate that GAFIC outperforms existing image-cropping methods, particularly in terms of accuracy and stability. Unlike pixel-level retargeting methods such as seam carving, inpainting, and diffusion-based synthesis, GAFIC does not synthesize or modify the retained pixels; instead, it selects an aesthetically preferred crop from the source image, making it suitable for scenarios where pixel integrity and efficient batch processing are important. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/GAFIC.git.

Problem

• image cropping
• global relationships
• aesthetic composition
• salient regions
• crop evaluation

Innovation

• Global Attention
• Feature Fusion
• Crop Evaluation
• Image Cropping
• Attention-Guided