Attribute-Conditioned Layout GAN for Automatic Graphic Design

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 27; no. 10; pp. 4039 - 4048
• Main Authors: Li, Jianan, Yang, Jimei, Zhang, Jianming, Liu, Chang, Wang, Christina, Xu, Tingfa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aspect ratio; attribute; Complexity; Design; Design optimization; Gallium nitride; Generative adversarial networks; Generators; Graphic design; Layout; Layouts; Optimization; Task analysis
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2020.2999335

Modeling layout is an important first step for graphic design. Recently, methods for generating graphic layouts have progressed, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, the problem of specifying the locations and sizes of design elements usually involves constraints with respect to element attributes, such as area, aspect ratio and reading-order. Automating attribute conditional graphic layouts remains a complex and unsolved problem. In this article, we introduce Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN to incorporate the attributes of design elements for graphic layout generation by forcing both the generator and the discriminator to meet attribute conditions. Due to the complexity of graphic designs, we further propose an element dropout method to make the discriminator look at partial lists of elements and learn their local patterns. In addition, we introduce various loss designs following different design principles for layout optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize graphic layouts conditioned on different element attributes. It can also adjust well-designed layouts to new sizes while retaining elements' original reading-orders. The effectiveness of our method is validated through a user study.