Seam Carving

Seam carving is a graphics technique for what is termed as “Content-aware image resizing” or “Re-targeting”, made extremely popular after a YouTube video started making the rounds.

References:

• Ariel Shamir’s Home Page wherein you’ll be able to download a 20MB PDF and the original video.

Plugins:

• A GIMP plugin (coded in C)
• A Photoshop plugin (sadly, Windows only)

Standalone Implementations:

• rsizr, an online Flash application (slow, but easy to use)
• A complete cross-platform GUI, based on Qt and CAIR
• Windows and Linux prototype with support for protection masks.
• Tim Wintle, who is focusing on a pure Python version (but, sadly, not releasing any code, only binaries)

Source Code:

• CAIR, the current popular implementation (multi-threaded versions are hosted at Sourceforge)
• C implementation (warning: it has endianness issues)
• Another C implementation (local copy)
• Java implementation (from the C one above, sadly requires Java 1.6 for some reason)
• A Python implementation (referenced here)
• Links to several Flash implementations (here’s an optimized ActionScript one)