Effective Image Resizing By Combining Scaling, Seam Carving and Canny Edge Detector

Images although being one of the key elements in digital media typically remain rigid in size and cannot deform to fit different layouts automatically. Standard image scaling is not sufficient since it is oblivious to the image content and typically can be applied only uniformly. Cropping is limited since it can only remove pixels from the image periphery. More effective resizing can only be achieved by considering the image content and not only geometric constraints. Seam carving uses an energy function defining the importance of pixels. But the problem with seam carving is that the straight lines are not preserved and the method doesn’t support global visualization of the target image. Simple methods such as scaling and cropping also have clear drawbacks. Scaling the image in horizontal or vertical direction can be performed in real-time using interpolation and will preserve the global visual effects. However, scaling causes obvious distortion if the aspect ratio is different between the input and the output. Just cropping the output to a window of the input image will discard too much information of interest if the output resolution is significantly lower than the input resolution. Therefore, the idea is to combine the seam carving and traditional algorithm and apply canny edge detection algorithm in the final step to preserve the straight lines and maintain the global visual effect in the images.