smartcrop.js

⚠️ This is a work in progress. Neither the API nor the algorithm are finished or battle proofen.

Smartcrop.js implements an algorithm to find good crops for images.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/endogamia/5682480447/ by N. Feans

It does this using fairly dumb image processing. In short:

1. Find edges using laplace
2. Find regions with a color like skin
3. Find regions high in saturation
4. Generate a set of candidate crops
5. Rank them using a importance function to focus the detail in the center and avoid it in the edges.
6. Output the candidate crop with the highest rank

Demos

• Test Suite, contains over 100 images, heavy
• Test Bed, allows you to upload your own images
• Photo transitions, automatically creats ken burns transitions for a slide show.

Simple Example

var result = SmartCrop.crop(image, {width: 100, height: 100}, function(result){console.log(result);});
// {topCrop: {x: 300, y: 200, height: 200, width: 200}}

Download/ Installation

npm install smartcrop or bower install smartcrop or just download smartcrop.js from the git repo.

CLI / Node.js

The smartcrop-cli offers command line interface to smartcrop.js. It is based on node.js and node-canvas. You can also view it as an example on how to use smartcrop.js from a node.js app.

Module Formats

Supported:

• common js
• amd
• global export / window

Supported Browsers

See caniuse.com/canvas

API

The API is not yet finalized. Look at the code for details and expect changes.

SmartCrop.crop(image, options, callback)

Crop image using options and call callback(result) when done.

image: anything ctx.drawImage() accepts, usually HTMLImageElement, HTMLCanvasElement or HTMLVideoElement

options: see cropOptions

callback: function(cropResult)

cropOptions

debug: if true, cropResults will contain a debugCanvas

minScale: minimal scale of the crop rect, set to 1.0 to prevent smaller than necessary crops (lowers the risk of chopping things off).

width: width of the crop you want to use.

height: height of the crop you want to use.

There are many more (for now undocumented) options available. Check the source and know that they might change in the future.

cropResult

{
  topCrop: crop,
  crops: [crop]
}

crop

{
  x: 1,
  y: 1,
  width: 1,
  height: 1
}

Tests

You can run the tests using grunt test. Alternatively you can also just run grunt (the default task) and open http://localhost:8000/test/. The test coverage for smartcrop.js is very limited at the moment. I expect to improve this as the code matures and the concepts solidify.

Benchmark

There are benchmarks for both the browser (test/benchmark.html) and node (node test/benchmark-node.js [requires node-canvas]) both powered by benchmark.js.

If you just want some rough numbers: It takes < 100 ms to find a square crop of a 640x427px picture on an i7. In other words, it's fine to run it on one image, it's not cool to run it on an entire gallery on page load.

Contributors

• Christian Muehlhaeuser

Ports, Alternatives

• smartcrop.go by Christian Muehlhaeuser

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Jonas Wanger, licensed under the MIT License (enclosed)