Enhanced seam carving via integration of energy gradient functionals

This letter proposes an improved seam carving approach for content-aware image retargeting. The proposed algorithm extends upon the backward and forward energy cost functionals used in previous seam carving methods by incorporating an energy gradient cost functional in the optimization process. This combined absolute energy cost functional penalizes seam candidates that cross areas of local extrema, which characterizes regions with high concentrations of #x201C;important #x201D; image detail. Experiments show superior visual quality results using the proposed absolute energy cost functional over existing methods on a variety of images characterized by high image detail concentration.