Seam Carving – Chopping Up your Images in Style

I came across a cool video today from SIGGRAPH 2007 which shows a process to manipulate images with out having to chop them up the usual way. The process uses gradients to find continuous lines of pixels which can be removed without effecting the subjects of the image. When the subject of the image does get manipulated for some reason, a marker can be put on to the image telling it to preserve that part. Also, objects can easily be removed by marking them negatively. The software will then take the gradients near by to fill in the gaps.

This type of manipulation will be very useful for websites which can be displayed on various sized screens such as high res large monitors right down to pocket pc sized screens. The full effect of the image could be displayed with out cropping out the main parts of the image.