Video retargeting: A visual-friendly dynamic programming approach

Video retargeting is the task of fitting standard-sized video into arbitrary screen. A compelling retargeting attempts to preserve most visual information of original video as well as deliver a temporally consistent retargeted view. To handle long video sequences, we perform the task on a shot/subshot basis. For each frame, a crop pane is determined to optimally select a region of interest as the retargeted frame in two stages: i.e. minimizing visual information loss (intra-frame consideration) to yield source and destination crop pane parameters at boundary frames and minimizing visual information loss accumulation under the visual inertness (inter-frame consideration) constraints to search for a smooth transition of crop pane across interior frames. The second minimization process is remodeled as the shortest-path problem in graph theory and the parametric transition of crop panes is solved by dynamic programming. Experiments demonstrate our approach preserves salient regions of original video whilst offering eye-friendly visual consistency.