It is required to provide an automated process for forming a visually
appealing digital collage (also referred to as a tapestry or
photomontage) from a plurality of input images. Input images and a
collage are labeled. Labels in the collage specify which regions of the
input images are used to form those collage regions. An energy function
is created for the labeling which contains terms that take into account
various criteria to produce a collage. For example, those criteria may
relate to the amount of information in the images, similarity of the
images, entropy in the images or object class information. A multi-stage
optimization process is applied to the energy function which is fast and
enables large numbers of input images to be used to produce a collage.