WOW! Image resizing on the fly - Seam Carving

Play this post

Every once in a while there comes a service that really helps all of us in a big way. Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing is one such service. The patent is held by Dr Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science and the service revolves around finding horizontal and vertical seams that can be removed/added to resize images. The video below will give you a 'better picture' of how exactly it happens in real time.

Dr. Ariel Shamir's Home Page will give you a detailed description on how it's done. The technique is impressive and comes at a time when most of us thought of image editing as a plain vanilla service. On a related note, it's interesting to imagine how this may change things in the future. For one, it'll give copyrighting a whole new definition as pictures can be easily altered to remove content (and thereby creating totally new images).

Comments on TechCrunch also talk about editing music files, videos and even text to fit the browser in your desktop or handheld device.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how this service gets integrated into some of the more well-known photo editing softwares (like Photoshop) and whether the technology can be borrowed into resizing our videos.