Synthesizing evocative imagery through design patterns

Automatically creating images that give a sense of content can be useful in a number of settings. Such images can summarize a larger collection of media in novel ways, giving an evocation of the whole, rather than a precise linguistic summary. Paradoxically, such visual summaries are often found to be more useful as indicators of the gestalt of a media than more traditional language summaries. We demonstrate a design pattern based method that creates visual compositions by selecting imagery from the source document(s) and instantiating several design patterns. Each pattern has a set of slots and roles that are filled with source imagery and then constrained to fit within the pattern visual specifications. Examples are given of the process and its end result. A pilot study has shown that these visual summaries lead to faster retrieval of relevant documents than textual summaries.