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Content-Aware Image Resizing
An anonymous reader writes "At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method is called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' (PDF paper here) and it figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. There is a video demonstration up on YouTube."
The author's website was pegged serving that 20MB PDF before slashdot got ahold of it, I doubt it'll survive now. The paper is also hosted by the ACM, if you're a subscriber.
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Open Source Sysadmin
It seems like a little bit of work is left to make it as completely automated as you would need to have it just "always work" on any platform or device, but it seems like they're already working on that...
;)
:)
Other than that though, that's pretty awesome... I'm sure there's more instances where it doesn't look right than what they showed, but it's definitely cool how well it works as it stands!
I can imagine it would be extremely useful for ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends; just load up all their photos of them and their ex, wave the magic eraser, and *boom* you don't have to delete all your old vacation shots
I wonder how well it would work for the porn industry too; nice automatic resizing of breasts without ruining the picture! Fetishists will be SO happy!
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Although they demonstrated on Windows, a friend of mine is one of their graduate students and was peripherally involved. He said it was originally developed as a GIMP plug in, but moved to a separate Windows app to show off the realtime resizing, etc. Hopefully they'll release the GIMP plugin? More likely Adobe will write them a check and license it to make sure that never happens.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I find a small irony in the fact that the video is posted on youtube, a site which stretches and squeezes video to fit into a 4:3 aspect ratio
I think you're missing the point of their method, which is to provide realistic images during rescaling that aren't corrupted by blind interpolation (equal averaging). In downscaling the images, it preserves parts of the images that would lose their information through downscaling (e.g. complex textures, people), while at the same time removing textures that would not lose information through downscaling (sky, water, sand). The sky, water and sand will still look like sky water and sand whether it's at 1/4 or 10x resolution, people however look much different if you try and downscale them or upscale them(they would appear blurry and hard to distinguish). The same works in reverse. The sky is still going to look like the sky whether you scale it to 10x or 5x-- it would still look natural. Tree's on the other hand, would not. Once you start to scale up the trees you would expect to be seeing different characteristics-- leaves, branches, etc. Any type of scaling up of a tree would make it seem very blurry and unnatural (lacking leaves, branches, etc.)-- you cannot create an additional information that isn't present in the original image. Therefore, the most natural looking image would be to increase the sky.
It's not perfect of course. I'm guessing that if you had a picture of two people next to each other, one with a solid colored shirt, and the other with a striped colored shirt, that the solid colored shirt guy would get skinner than the striped when shrinking, and the reverse when enlarging. However, it's a neat idea, and I look forward to reading the paper.
It's not removing any more pixels than normal resizing or cropping would, it's just doing it such that the least important ones are removed first. Instead of:
he uic bownfoxjumed verthelaz yelowdog
You get:
Th qik brwn fx jmpd ovr th lzy ylo dog
Which reduces the total size by the same amount, but retains more information than treating every bit of information the same.
I thought it was pretty cool, so I made my own version after seeing the video. It obviously won't be as awesome as their one, but if you want to play around with it, you can get my C source and have a play around. It is GPL3.
while this is technically true, you're also rearranging the relative positioning of those pixels. cropping something out doesn't change the relationship of what is left in the photo (though it may remove critical details).
if you have 3 people in a picture and you crop it down to 2, you've erased a person, but you haven't changed who is seated next to whom. if you use this method and the middle person is erased, you make it appear as though the outer two people were in fact seated next to each other when they weren't.
we are used to the idea that a picture can be cropped (mentally considering what might be just outside the frame). We aren't yet used to the concept that the photo has effectively been cut and pasted together to create new relationships between the objects in the photo (though of course photoshop is getting us there).
to continue your analogy, if we take:
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
and drop letters, we can create:
the cow jumped over the dog
whereas "cropping" might let us say:
the quick brown fox jumped
I think it's clear that one of these is more misleading than the other, though in both cases you're just removing information. (in one case, some of that information happens to be spaces between letters/words)
It has nothing to do with edge detection. The algorithm simply detects paths of minimal gradient which lead from one side of the image to the opposite side. This can be used to produce a "pretty picture" which shows the edges -- but this is merely fallout.
They showed what I thought were several realistic photos with complex backgrounds, and the algorithm did well overall, except on structures where people are closely attuned to exact detail -- such as human faces. If we weren't innately wired to process faces in incredible detail, we wouldn't even notice the distortion.
So it's not perfect. Can you show me something in this world that is? And I don't think there has been any mention of "prime time" application, whatever that means.
Your comment seems to be similar to the headline on tabloids.. Just because a technology could be used for negative purposes does not mean that it should not be developed.. If your reasoning was used, we should have all been living in caves by now..
By your reasoning
Cars can be used by criminals to travel faster.
A knife can be used to kill
Electricity can be used to kill
Computers can be used by the govt to collect more information abt us effectively
Is that really what we want?
see the flaw in the logic?