A shadow preservation framework for effective content-aware image retargeting process

Abstract

<p>In the discipline of image retargeting, the structure of shadows in the image is required to be preserved since it gives structural information about the objects. Many traditional image retargeting techniques do not pay attention to preserve the shadow objects present in the image. In this paper a shadow-preservation framework is proposed in which the saliency map is derived using segmentation-based gPb-owt-ucm approach to emphasize the salient regions. To assess the quality of saliency map a fixation prediction analysis is conducted on each section of the image using the eye tracker technology. Second, to pay more attention on the shadow objects a shadow map is developed after executing image pre-processing, shadow detection, region growing, and region filling operations. To rectify the issue of misclassification of shadow pixels erosion and dilation operations are performed. To obtain an efficient importance map, a gradient map is prepared using canny operator which is further combined with the saliency map and shadow map. The obtained importance map is supplied to the seam diversion based image retargeting (SDIR) technique to resize the image in horizontal and vertical directions. To justify the efficiency of the proposed framework’s the obtained results are compared with the existing state-of-the-art. By preserving shadows, the proposed framework enhances the overall visual quality and maintains the integrity of objects in the retargeted images. The framework’s effectiveness is validated through quantitative evaluations and visual comparisons with existing methods. The results demonstrate its potential for improving content-aware image retargeting applications, paving the way for more realistic and visually appealing image resizing techniques in various domains.<em></em></p>