Seam Carving

Seam Carving is a content-aware image resizing algorithm. It is a way to change the aspect ratio of a picture without scaling or cropping.

Suppose we have the following image that we want to resize into a square shape.

Should it be scaled?

Should it be cropped?

What about Seam Carving?

Seam Carving works by removing the least important seam of pixels from the photo. What we define as "important" is what makes the algorithm work so well. We can say important information happens at edges, and create an algorithm to measure the "edginess" of a photo.

Now we decide which seams we can remove. We want the columns with the most black.

We are saying these "seams" are least important, they can be removed.
Rip em out and you get this

Pretty cool!
Did you know Adobe Photoshop has this feature. It's called "Content Aware Scaling"
And now I leave you with a video that shows seam carving's capabilities when used for video.