Patent Document ID: 8274533
Application ID: 12369790
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for resizing an image of a document in an image processing system, the method comprising: receiving an image of a document to be resized to a desired target dimension, said image having a plurality of pixels; carving a plurality of seams from a first edge to a second edge of said image in one of a horizontal and vertical direction based on an importance map generated for said image; calculating an energy for each of said seams; identifying seams composed of background pixels based on said seam energy; grouping adjacent seams together to form background seam groups; classifying said background seam groups based upon their respective overall seam group width; determining a target number of seams to be removed from said background seam groups based on a width of said background seam group; removing said target number of seams from said background seam groups until said image has been resized to a desired target dimension, comprising removing seams of wider background seam groups first before removing seams from progressively narrower background seam groups, each of said background seams groups retaining their ordering by their respective overall seam group width such that, if a background seam group is wider than a next smaller background seam group before resizing, it will not be any narrower than the next smaller seam group after resizing; and providing said resized image of said document to an image output device.