Seam Carving

Seam carving (also known as image retargeting, content-aware image resizing, content-aware scaling, liquid resizing, or liquid rescaling), is an algorithm for image resizing, developed by Shai Avidan, of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), and Ariel Shamir, of the Interdisciplinary Center and MERL. It functions by establishing a number of seams (paths of least importance) in an image and automatically removes seams to reduce image size or inserts seams to extend it. Seam carving also allows manually defining areas in which pixels may not be modified, and features the ability to remove whole objects from photographs. The purpose of the algorithm is to display images without distortion on various media (cell phones, PDAs) using document standards, like HTML, that already support dynamic changes in page layout and text, but not images.