Friday, August 24, 2007

Content-Aware Image Resizing

Yet another Siggraph video that blows my mind -- "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing" by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.



(via AE Portal News)

Part of what's so interesting is the idea of finding patterns in images/video that allow a system to be "content-aware". The use of edge detection to determine important vs. non important visual information reminds me of the process of analyzing time-sliced video footage to interpolate when cuts, dissolves, or wipes take place. Eddie Elliott has a great example of this on his website. Essentially, if you take all the frames of a video and place them back to back to make a cube, by looking at the sides of the cube you can see where a left to right wipe, a cut to different looking footage, or a cross dissolve take place. Someone told me a couple years ago about a company trying to refine the technique in order to create a software program that logged archived footage procedurally, rather than hiring someone to plod through hours of footage.


Image from Eddit Elliot's Video Streamer page. For more on time-slice/slitscan artworks, Golan Levin has a good archive here.

3 comments:

Wiley said...

We had a post a while back about volumetric video, but this is the first practical application I've heard for it (procedural logging). The content aware resizing stuff is awesome too.

Anonymous said...

Check out rsizr.com for a free Flash-based implementation of seam carving that lets you resize your own images, both in height and width simultaneously, in real time. (You can rescale and crop images too!)

http://rsizr.com/about/gallery/ for example images

Anonymous said...

Great video…I guess there should be more people out there who would allocate their time to discovering things like this to make our lives easier. For those of you who are looking for a good resizing tool I highly recommend Reshadefrom http:reshade.com. If you ever wanted to have more control over your pictures this tool is what I recommend. You can test it online at reshade.com. Accuracy, quality and sharpness will not be an issue.