# Tag Archives: research

Research

## Improving region-bound seam carving

I found this small research paper (PDF, 11.7 MB) that I wrote last year about seam carving, colloquially known as ‘content-aware image resizing’, lingering on my laptop. Last year, I did some research on how to improve the original seam carving method devised by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. If you’re not familiar with seam carving, you should definitely watch this video.

One way to improve seam carving is by partitioning an image into separate regions, or ‘region-bound seam carving’ as we dubbed it. Seams can then be bound to horizontal or vertical regions to make sure that they follow a relatively straight path. Region-bound seam carving performed quite well, but left room for improvement as well. That’s why I came up with 2-dimensional region-bound seam carving.

In regular region-based seam carving, an image with width $n$ and height $m$, each pixel $p_{x,y}$ can be assigned a horizontal and vertical region class $R_{x}$ and $R_{y}$ using the following formulae:

$R_{x}(p_{x,y}) = \frac{1}{r} \lfloor \frac{r}{n} \displaystyle\sum\limits_{i=0}^{n-1} e_{local}(p_{i,y}) \rfloor$
$R_{y}(p_{x,y}) = \frac{1}{r} \lfloor \frac{r}{m} \displaystyle\sum\limits_{i=0}^{m-1} e_{local}(p_{x,i}) \rfloor$.