Seam Carving with Improved Edge Preservation

In this paper, we propose a new method to adapt the resolution of images to the limited display resolution of mobile devices. We use the seam carving technique to identify and remove less relevant content in images. Seam carving achieves a high adaptation quality for landscape images and distortions caused by the removal of seams are very low compared to other techniques like scaling or cropping. However, if an image depicts objects with straight lines or regular patterns like buildings, the visual quality of the adapted images is much lower. Errors caused by seam carving are especially obvious if straight lines become curved or disconnected. In order to preserve straight lines, our algorithm applies line detection in addition to the normal energy function of seam carving. The energy in the local neighborhood of the intersection point of a seam and a straight line is increased to prevent other seams from removing adjacent pixels. We evaluate our improved seam carving algorithm and compare the results with regular seam carving. In case of landscape images with no straight lines, traditional seam carving and our enhanced approach lead to very similar results. However, in the case of objects with straight lines, the quality of our results is significantly better.