Seamlets: Content-aware nonlinear wavelet transform

With the rise of mobile media devices, resizing an image or video to fit a screen of arbitrary size has become an important topic. In general, arbitrary resizing does not preserve the original image aspect ratio, and hence, can introduce significant visual distortion. Content-aware retargeting methods have been proposed to preserve salient features of an image or video even under arbitrary changing of the aspect ratio. While these are useful tools, little attention has been given to the development of an efficient retargeting-driven representation of images. Such representation, for example, can lead to efficient distribution of media destined for retargeting at a variety of devices with different aspect ratios. We propose a new framework, seamlets, which utilizes the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to perform content-aware arbitrary media resizing. In essence, seamlets provide an efficient multi-resolution representation for retargeting applications. The seamlet transform elegantly generalizes the DWT and seam carving, which is an intriguing retargeting method. The result is a new image framework, seamlets, that inherits the benefits of retargeting and wavelets.