Visually preserving stereoscopic image retargeting using depth carving

Abstract

This paper presents a method for retargeting a pair of stereoscopic images. Previous works have leveraged seam carving and image warping methods for two-dimensional image editing to address this issue. However, they did not consider the full advantages of the properties of stereoscopic images. Our approach offers substantial performance improvements over the state-of-the-art; the key insights driving the approach are that the input image pair can be decomposed into different depth layers according to the disparity and image segmentation, and the depth cues allow us to address the problem in a three-dimensional (3-D) space domain for best preserving objects. We propose depth carving that extends seam carving in a single image to resize the stereo image pair with disparity consistency. Our method minimizes the shape distortion and preserves object boundaries by creating new occlusions. As a result, the retargeted image pair preserves the stereoscopic quality and protects the original 3-D scene structure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous methods.