Anisotropic energy accumulation for stereoscopic image seam carving

Seam carving is an image resizing method that aims at adapting the image to various display screens while reducing the distortion as much as possible. Severe visual distortion may be introduced by repeated removal or insertion of seams within a concentrated region of the image. To reduce such visual distortion, we propose a new AESSC method. First, we distribute the energy of each pixel on the seam to its adjacent 8-connected pixels when removing or inserting a seam. Second, since the information of each pixel is anisotropic, we use the Sobel operator to detect the direction that has the maximum edge information and continue the energy accumulation along this direction. Besides, we incorporate a 3D structure consistency constraint in the energy function and adopt a pixel visibility maintenance method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce visual distortion for stereo images while maintaining the geometric consistency.