Multi-operator image retargeting with automatic integration of direct and indirect seam carving

Multi-operator image resizing can preserve important objects and structure in an image by combining multiple image resizing operators. However, traditional multi-operator methods do not take both horizontal and vertical content-aware resizing potential into consideration, which essentially leads to squeeze/stretch effect in the resultant images. In this paper, we propose a new multi-operator scheme that addresses aforementioned issue by integrating direct and indirect seam carving. Compared with previous methods, the proposed scheme remarkably reduces the cost of deciding when to change operators, by employing a newly defined image artifact measure. Furthermore, we propose a novel seam carving enhancement, named ACcumulated Energy Seam Carving (ACESC), as a basic operator to improve global structure preservation. By combining horizontal and vertical seam carving, our scheme preserves the shapes of important objects well. We present typical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. User study shows that our method has high user preference. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.