Seam Carving Case Study

Seam Carving for Content Aware Image ResizingYashovardhan Sharma, Parth ShrivastavaApril 2015AbstractImages can be scaled or cropped for resizing but there is a loss of content by using these methods. Toeradicate this loss in content, Seam Carving was introduced. A Seam is an 8 connected path of pixelswhich traverses an image either from top to bottom or from left to right. Each pixel is assigned an energyusing an Energy function and vertical/horizontal seams are generated on this basis. They are then removedor inserted on the basis of their energy, in an optimal order. This leads to the change in aspect ratio of animage, without any noticeable loss in content. The following are some application’s of seam carving:1. Re-targeting of an image2.
LimitationsAfter being so effective for image resizing,there are still some problems with seam carv-ing method. The problem arises when un-changeable area of the photo gets disturbed.Now the prohibited area is the area whereeither energy of the pixels are too high or theportion of image plays a crucial part in theimage. So the prohibited area is unchangeable.For highly condensed image, Seam Carvingwouldn’t succeed. It is true that seam is thelowest energy path which is to be removedbut in a condensed image, too many importantareas are there which can’t be edited.Figure 7:Important Image (left) or where the con-tent layout prevents seams to bypass importantparts (right).Second, the layout of the image content. Herethe image is not condensed, in fact the contentprevents the seams from bypassing the impor-tant portions of the image.Finally, when it comes to detailed portions ofimage like face, one does not want to changethe size of ones’ head, cheeks or hair. Seamcarving is not applicable on these types of im-ages.VII. ConclusionSeam Carving is an extremely useful and effi-cient method for resizing images without anysignificant loss in content. It does not sufferfrom the setbacks of traditional resizing meth-ods such as cropping, scaling, interpolationetc.It also has several practical applications, someof which are incredibly useful in our *everydaylives.eg. Dynamic resizing of images* on websitesdepending on the screen size of the device weview them on.And while, the concept of resizing imagesto any size with minimal loss in content is avery appealing one, it certainly also has itsown set *of limitations.But, despite everything else, one thing is forcertain -* Seam Carving was indeed a revolu-tionary approach in the field of Content-AwareImage Resizing.References[1]Histograms of oriented gradients for humandetection - Dalal, N., and Triggs, B. 2005[2]Synergism in low-level vision -