CMAIR: content and mask-aware image retargeting

Abstract

In recent years, more and more image retargeting techniques have been proposed to facilitate our daily life, in particular those based on the use of seam carving, warping or the combination of them. However, these techniques can only retarget the source picture into the same shape of a square, and these approaches cannot be reshape into a circular, a polygon or other shapes. This paper focuses on creating a graphics editing system, named CMAIR (Content and Mask-Aware Image Retargeting), for image retargeting, which can retarget the source images into different shapes of image to highlight the salient objects of primary region of interest. CMAIR effectively supports removal of unimportant pixels, and frames as many surrounding objects inside the provided mask as possible. Also, we propose a unique irregular interpolation method to produce four possible target images, and an evaluation mechanism to decide the best candidate image as the final output with the consideration of image saliency. The results show that not only the source image can be placed into different targeted shapes of mask, but also the salient objects are retained and highlighted as much as possible.