Fast Seam Carving Using Gaussian Pyramid

Image retargeting means to change the aspect ratio and resolution of an image in order to display it on different devices. During retargeting, how to keep significant image areas from obvious distortion is the main consideration. The seam carving method handles the challenge by recursively removing pixel seam with minimal cost. Though it can generate convincing results, the computation needed to find a seam is very time consuming. In this paper, we propose a new framework to speed up seam carving using Gaussian pyramid. First, we build Gaussian pyramid of an image. Then we distribute the seams to be removed over the pyramid layers. Removing one seam in the second layer means two seams in the first, and so on. Finally, we map seams in different layers back to the original image and remove them. In this way, we can reach good retargeting results while simultaneously reducing the number of seams to be removed and computational time for finding each seam.