Adaptive multiple-pixel wide seam carving

Content-aware image retargeting methods address the resizing of an image to be displayed on devices having different aspect ratios and resolutions. Seam carving method is an effective image retargeting method which suffers from high computational complexity. It requires one to find one-pixel wide minimum energy path in either vertical or horizontal direction, called seam, to reduce the image size by one pixel. In this paper, we propose an acceleration of the seam carving method by expanding the width of the seam making it multiple-pixel wide seam carving. The two types of energies: one corresponding to the pixels to be removed and another corresponding to the pixels across the multiple-pixel wide seam, increase as the width of the seam increases. In order to prevent the increase in these energies, we make the width of the seam adaptive as a function of the number of iterations. We find the width of a seam for each iteration as a prior for the seam carving process using a set of maximum energy seams in an orthogonal direction to the seam carving process. Qualitative and quantitative results prove that the proposed method performs faster and better than the other state-of-the-art image retargeting operators.