Automatic photo collage generation is a technique to display multiple photographs within a specific framework automatically. To generate user satisfied and aesthetic photo collages, this paper proposed an interactive genetic programming algorithm based on aesthetics. User's preference and the aesthetic of photo collage are combined into the fitness function to guide the evolution direction of the algorithm. While user’s preference was obtained from the interaction between users and the computer, and color aesthetic models were used to evaluate the aesthetics of photo collage. The experiments were performed to verify the validity of this method. The results showed the photo collages generated by the proposed algorithm offered higher user satisfaction and were regarded to be more beautiful compare with collages generated by other algorithms.
