Seam Segment Carving: Retargeting Images to Irregularly-Shaped Image Domains

Image retargeting algorithms aim to adapt the image to the display screen with the goal of preserving the image content as much as possible. However, existing methods and research efforts have mostly been directed towards retargeting algorithms that retarget images to rectangular domains. This significantly hampers its application to broader classes of display devices and platforms for which the display area can be of any origins and shapes. For example, seam carving-based methods retarget images by carving out seams that run from the top to the bottom of the images, and this results in changing the width and therefore aspect ratio of the image without changing the shape of the image boundary in any essential way. However, by carving out appropriately-chosen seam segments, seams that are not required to cut across the entire image, it is then possible to retarget the images to a broader array of image domains with non-rectangular boundaries. Based on this simple idea of carving out the seam segments, the main contribution of this paper is a novel image retargeting algorithm that is capable of retargeting images to non-rectangular domains. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on a number of challenging indoor and outdoor scene images, and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is both efficient and effective, and it is capable of providing good-quality retargeted images for a variety of interesting boundary shapes.