Seam carving with rate-dependent seam path information

In this paper, we present a seam carving, which is a well-known content-aware image resizing method, with a constraint on bitrates for seam path information (SPI). The SPI corresponds to pixel positions to be pruned and it generally requires high bitrate when we store or transmit it. However, the SPI should be transmitted to re ceivers in the case that the receivers are devices with low computing power, such as cell phones and PDAs since seam carving at the receivers is a computationally-demanding process. We resolve the problem by applying piecewise linear approximation to the seam paths. In the experimental results, the retargeted images yielded by the original seam carving and the proposed one are very similar, whereas required bitrate for the SPI in the proposed method is 34-97 % less than the original one.