Seam carving

Original image to be made narrower
Scaling is undesirable because the castle is distorted.
Cropping is undesirable because part of the castle is removed.
Seam carving

Seam carving (or liquid rescaling) is an algorithm for content-aware image resizing, developed by Shai Avidan, of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), and Ariel Shamir, of the Interdisciplinary Center and MERL. It functions by establishing a number of seams (paths of least importance) in an image and automatically removes seams to reduce image size or inserts seams to extend it. Seam carving also allows manually defining areas in which pixels may not be modified, and features the ability to remove whole objects from photographs.

The purpose of the algorithm is image retargeting, which is the problem of displaying images without distortion on media of various sizes (cell phones, projection screens) using document standards, like HTML, that already support dynamic changes in page layout and text but not images.[1]

Image Retargeting was invented by Vidya Setlur, Saeko Takage, Ramesh Raskar, Michael Gleicher and Bruce Gooch in 2005.[2] The work by Setlur et al. won the 10-year impact award in 2015[where?].

  1. ^ Avidan, Shai; Shamir, Ariel (July 2007). "Seam carving for content-aware image resizing". ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers. p. 10. doi:10.1145/1275808.1276390. ISBN 978-1-4503-7836-9.
  2. ^ Vidya Setlur; Saeko Takage; Ramesh Raskar; Michael Gleicher; Bruce Gooch (December 2005). "Automatic image retargeting". Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia - MUM '05. pp. 59–68. doi:10.1145/1149488.1149499. ISBN 0-473-10658-2.