  Image cropping aims at improving the aesthetic quality of images by adjusting
their composition. Most weakly supervised cropping methods (without bounding
box supervision) rely on the sliding window mechanism. The sliding window
mechanism requires fixed aspect ratios and limits the cropping region with
arbitrary size. Moreover, the sliding window method usually produces tens of
thousands of windows on the input image which is very time-consuming. Motivated
by these challenges, we firstly formulate the aesthetic image cropping as a
sequential decision-making process and propose a weakly supervised Aesthetics
Aware Reinforcement Learning (A2-RL) framework to address this problem.
Particularly, the proposed method develops an aesthetics aware reward function
which especially benefits image cropping. Similar to human's decision making,
we use a comprehensive state representation including both the current
observation and the historical experience. We train the agent using the
actor-critic architecture in an end-to-end manner. The agent is evaluated on
several popular unseen cropping datasets. Experiment results show that our
method achieves the state-of-the-art performance with much fewer candidate
windows and much less time compared with previous weakly supervised methods.
