Video, like images, should support content aware resizing. We present video retargeting using an improved seam carving operator. Instead of removing 1D seams from 2D images we remove 2D seam manifolds from 3D space-time volumes. To achieve this we replace the dynamic programming method of seam carving with graph cuts that are suitable for 3D volumes. In the new formulation, a seam is given by a minimal cut in the graph and we show how to construct a graph such that the resulting cut is a valid seam. That is, the cut is monotonic and connected. In addition, we present a novel energy criterion that improves the visual quality of the retargeted images and videos. The original seam carving operator is focused on removing seams with the least amount of energy, ignoring energy that is introduced into the images and video by applying the operator. To counter this, the new criterion is looking forward in time -removing seams that introduce the least amount of energy into the retargeted result. We show how to encode the improved criterion into graph cuts (for images and video) as well as dynamic programming (for images). We apply our technique to images and videos and present results of various applications. This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.  Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profi t or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the fi rst page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specifi c permission and/or a fee. Figure 1 : Improved seam carving for video sequences combines the frames of the video to form a 3D cube and finds 2D monotonic and connected manifold seams using graph cuts. The intersection of the manifolds with each frame defines the seams on the frame. The manifolds are found using a new forward-energy criterion that reduces both spatial and temporal artifacts considerably. Video, like images, should support content aware resizing. We present video retargeting using an improved seam carving operator. Instead of removing 1D seams from 2D images we remove 2D seam manifolds from 3D space-time volumes. To achieve this we replace the dynamic programming method of seam carving with graph cuts that are suitable for 3D volumes. In the new formulation, a seam is given by a minimal cut in the graph and we show how to construct a graph such that the resulting cut is a valid seam. That is, the cut is monotonic and connected. In addition, we present a novel energy criterion that improves the visual quality of the retargeted images and videos. The original seam carving operator is focused on removing seams with the least amount of energy, ignoring energy that is introduced into the images and video by applying the operator. To counter this, the new criterion is looking forward in time -removing seams that introduce the least amount of energy into the retargeted result. We show how to encode the improved criterion into graph cuts (for images and video) as well as dynamic programming (for images). We apply our technique to images and videos and present results of various applications.
Rubinstein et al. REF later apply seam carving in 3D volume for video retargeting.
Improved seam carving for video retargeting
ACM Tran. Graphics
Computer Science