Stream Carving: an Adaptive Seam Carving Algorithm

We propose a new content-aware image resizing scheme, "Stream Carving", which is based on the well-known seam carving method. Our algorithm may introduce larger seams in the retargeted image, i.e. seams with a width larger than one pixel, that we call "streams". The resulting holes are then recovered using an inpainting method. Our retargeting algorithm is also more related to human perception by exploiting an adaptive importance map that merges several features like gradient magnitude, saliency, face, edge and straight line detection. Our approach induces an increase in the quality of the retargeted image when compared to the original seam carving method and provides similar or better results than other actual image retargeting techniques.