Patent 7978918 was granted and assigned to Eastman Kodak on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An improved method for cropping a main subject from a digital image is disclosed. A skin color map and face map are independently computed and then blended to produce a revised map. A region map is computed by segmenting the digital image into a plurality of regions. A main subject importance map is calculated from the revised map and the region map. The digital image is cropped based on the main subject map.