Seam carving

Seam carving is a content-aware image resizing technique where the image is reduced in size by one pixel in height (or width) at a time. A vertical seam in an image is a path of pixels connected from the top to the bottom with one pixel in each row. A horizontal seam is a path of pixels connected from the left to the right with one pixel in each column. Although the underlying algorithm is simple and elegant, it was not discovered until 2007.

 

Now it is now a core feature in Adobe Photoshop and other computer graphics applications. Unlike standard content-agnostic resizing techniques, such as cropping and scaling, seam carving preserves the most interesting features of the image, such as aspect ratio, set of objects present, and so on. Finding and removing a seam involves three parts:

1. Energy calculation: The first step is to calculate the energy of a pixel, which is a measure of its importance—the higher the energy, the less likely that the pixel will be included as part of a...