How does it work?

We have been talking about image resizing and how we should consider the image's content when we resize it. So why on earth is it called seam carving? It should just be called content-aware image resizing, right? Well, there are many different terms that are used to describe this process, such as image re-targeting, liquid scaling, seam carving, and so on. It's called seam carving because of the way we resize the image. The algorithm was proposed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. You can refer to the original paper at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1276390.

We know that the goal is to resize the given image and keep the interesting content intact. So, we do that by finding the paths of least importance in the image. These paths are called seams. Once we find these seams, we remove or stretch them from the image to obtain a re-scaled image. This process of removing or stretching, or carving, will eventually result in a resized image. This is the reason we call it seam carving...