I’ve been working on the Algorithms II course from Princeton on Coursera lately, which has been pretty interesting. One of the assignments is on the topic of seam carving, which is a technique for arbitrarily resizing images while maintaining as much of the important detail as possible. It’s also referred to as image re-targeting, coming from the idea of re-targeting an image for a phone/tablet screen with a different resolution and aspect ratio.

Seam carving prioritises important details during resizing

The problem with traditional resizing of images where the aspect ratio is changing is that it requires either cropping or stretching the original image. Stretching makes the main features look warped, especially people, while cropping loses detail – especially if there’s no dead zone on one side that can be cropped away, like an empty sky.

Instead of scaling all parts of the image equally, it can be advantageous to remove more of the dead zone pixels, such as gaps between people in photographs. This is why seam carving has been used to implement Content Aware Scaling in Photoshop. There’s a good example on that page, too.

Seam carving achieves this by identifying the “energy” of each pixel, which is a measurement of the how important to the image the detail of each pixel is. It then identifies horizontal or vertical seams through the image and removes the seam with the least total energy. The seams don’t have to be straight lines, allowing the algorithm to remove paths of low detail pixels that follow the shape of the image.

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