Fast volume seam carving with multi-pass dynamic programming

In volume seam carving, seam carving for three-dimensional (3D) cost volume, an optimal seam surface can be derived by graph cuts, resulting from sophisticated graph construction. However, the graph cuts algorithm is not suitable for practical use because it incurs a heavy computational load. We propose a multi-pass dynamic programming (DP) based approach for volume seam carving that reduces computation time to 60 times faster and memory consumption to 10 times smaller than those of graph cuts, while maintaining a similar image quality as that of graph cuts. In our multi-pass DP, a suboptimal seam surface is created instead of a globally optimal one, but it has been experimentally confirmed by more than 198 crowd workers that such suboptimal seams are good enough for image processing.