Improved seam carving using a modified energy function based on wavelet decomposition

In this paper, a novel content-aware image resizing technique, perceptually improved seam carving with modified energy function, is proposed. The conventional seam carving method using a gradient-based energy function may cause distortion of deformed object shape depending on the layout and amount of contents. However, the proposed method preserves content shape with high fidelity by exploiting a wavelet-based energy function which represents image features effectively within the scale-space framework. To prevent excessively distorting the images, a switching scheme between seam carving and resampling is proposed based on the energy distribution. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve higher subjective image quality than the existing methods including scaling and conventional seam carving.