Reflection symmetry aware image retargeting

Abstract Reflection symmetry is one of the most commonly occurring and prominent visual attributes present in the real world. With an increase in the display devices of different sizes and aspect ratios, the images captured from the real world need to be resized to fit to the display device. In this paper, we propose a novel image retargeting approach which preserves the reflection symmetry present in the image during the image retargeting process. We detect the symmetry region present in the image using symmetry axis detection and object proposals. We propose a novel framework for finding an optimized reflected seam for the least energy seam defined by the seam carving approach. The symmetry axis and the symmetric object are preserved by adding or removing a seam and its reflected counterpart together. We show better preservation of symmetry axis, preservation of shape of the symmetric object, and quality of image retargeting when compared to the existing methods using three quantitative measures along with the qualitative results.