Seam Carving is a novel technique for doing content-aware image resizing aka “image retargeting”. The idea is to remove seams of low-energy pixels one at a time until the image is truncated to the desired dimensions. In the papers cited below we are introduced to the concept and its applications.

• Shamir, A., & Avidan, S. (2007) Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing. http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/imret/index.html
• Rubinstein, M., Shamir, A., & Avidan, S. (2008) Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting. http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/index.html

We present an implementation of the Seam Carving technique in pure JavaScript running in the browser. The implementation of the algorithm is summarized:

• Calculate image gradient in x and y direction
• Use dynamic programming to calculate minimum seam energies over the entire image
• Extract the minimum energy seam, this removes exactly 1 pixel along one dimension
• Repeat until the desired dimension is achieved

In the results below we see that a typical scaling operation will uniformly flatten scene objects, while retargeting keeps the size of certain elements intact.

Original