DESIRe: Discontinuous energy seam carving for image retargeting via structural and textural energy functionals

Abstract

This paper proposes DESIRe (Discontinuous Energy Seam-carving Image Retargeting), an improved seam carving approach for content-aware image retargeting. The proposed algorithm introduces a novel discontinuous seam carving optimization process that incorporates not only a structural energy cost functional, but also a texture energy cost functional to handle scenes with complex structural and textural characteristics. Experimental results using a variety of scenes with dense image detail characteristics show that the proposed DESIRe seam carving approach can provide improved visual quality when compared to a number of existing seam carving methods. These results illustrate the potential of the proposed DESIRe approach for improving content-aware image retargeting that reduces the loss of important image information without causing significant visual distortions or artifacts.