Accumulative Energy-Based Seam Carving for Image Resizing

Abstract

With the diversified development of the digital devices, such as computer, mobile phone, pad and television, how to resize an image or video to adapt to different display screens has been attracting more and more peoples' attention. Seam carving has been an important method for image resizing. If multiple removed or inserted seams are located within a certain region, it can lead to discontinuity image content. Besides, the salient objects tend to be destroyed if the energy function only contains the gradient information. Therefore, we propose an accumulative energy-based seam carving method for image resizing. When removing a certain seam, we distribute the energy of each pixel on the seam to its adjacent 8-connected pixels in order to avoid the extreme concentration of seams, especially within a texture region. In addition, we add the image saliency and the edge information into the energy function to reduce the distortion. Since the computational complexity of seam carving method is very high, we use parallel computing environment to achieve efficient computation. Experimental results show that compared with the existing methods, our method can both avoid the discontinuity of image content and distortions as well as better maintain the shape of the salient objects.