Seam Carving

By Shamus Posted Thursday Nov 1, 2007

Filed under: Movies 26 comments

This is amazing:

It’s sold as a way to make photos scale to available space while still retaining vital elements, although all I could see was the greatest photoshopping tool ever devised. The part where they seamlessly cut people out of the beach photo was brillaint.

 


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26 thoughts on “Seam Carving

  1. Shandrunn says:

    The way people are smoothly taken out of pictures, Stalin would be proud.

  2. Gary says:

    That was awesome! I would definitely want a program that was that versatile. Though I am still a little skeptical that it could perform so flawlessly.

  3. Steve says:

    You can try this yourself. Plugins are available for Photoshop and The Gimp already.

    Photoshop -> http://picutel.com/

    The Gimp -> Search for ‘Liquid Rescale’ on http://registry.gimp.org

  4. Mattius Caesar says:

    no doubt those are good example images, but still, the tool is extremely impressive

  5. Shamus says:

    Yeah, if Stalin had this in his day, the only pictures we’d have of him would be him sitting alone.

  6. Nazgul says:

    “Stalin would be proud” LOL! Funny how I noticed the creepy potential of this as well, although really it’s just another of many digital image manipulation tools that could be abused.

    I agree with Shamus, this would be a great addition or supplement to Photoshop. If it can edit things out that well and that quickly overall, it’s going to get a ton of use.

    I recognized the beautiful beach cove with the waterfall that they used in the presentation, as I’ve been there and have photographed it too. It’s down by Big Sur here in California.

  7. Steve says:

    One other tidbit of news. The clever chaps who wrote this now work for Adobe.

  8. Henebry says:

    The coolest bit for me was the real-time resizing.

    Looks as though these guys are trying to promote this as a new standard for images on the web. They could have sold it as a proprietary filter for Photoshop, but they’re doing something that’s close the the opposite: trying to sell it to everyone

  9. Inane Fedaykin says:

    That is so awesome.

  10. Mike R says:

    Very slick…

  11. Fieari says:

    Steve: The link you gave to search for the gimp plugin? After searching, it basically leads you here: http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/

    It’s fantastically awesome. I’m finding it difficult to get the “people remover” thing to work on cell shaded drawn images, but I guess the patterns there are too stark for it. Other than that, it works pretty much as advertised!

  12. Don Monkey says:

    As someone who writes CHM-based software documentation as part of my job, I am very interested in the web page applications of this technology. Screenshots are such a pain sometimes, and would be an excellent candidate for dynamic resizing in the way shown here.

    I’m going to look at the Gimp plugin and see if I can make use of it. That would be SWEET.

  13. Taelus says:

    Ok, I think I finally have a way to get my X-Wife out of some really great pictures. This is going to be fun to play with :-)

  14. Taellosse says:

    That…is so cool. I don’t even edit photographs all that often, and I want this feature in my Photoshop.

  15. hank says:

    More info:

    Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Retargeting
    http://www.shaiavidan.org/papers/imretFinal.pdf (2.0MB)

  16. Taelus says:

    Oh yeah, anyone find a version for photoshop that actually allowed the “people remover” aspect? Maybe I’m just completely without a functional brain today, but I’m missing it somehow.

  17. ZzzzSleep says:

    You can do this online too!
    Have a look at http://rsizr.com/

  18. Amanda says:

    That is absolutely awesome! Now I have to upgrade my PhotoShop to get that plug in.

  19. refugee says:

    My DVD player can fast forward through a scene without distorting the audio too much. I wonder if the two techniques are mathematically equivalent. If not, perhaps an audio version of this technique would yield an even better result.

    Also, I wonder how easy it is to detect this kind of tampering, based on the idea that the average “energy” goes up as you repeatedly delete low energy paths.

    (By the way, the Turing test on this blog is mightily annoying. Neither dz0, dzO, nor dzo worked, and when I back-buttoned to retry, it threw away my post. This is my fourth try, written in Textpad and copy-pasted. I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.8 for Windows XP SP2. “d20” turned out to be the correct guess.)

  20. Viktor says:

    Yeah, this is pretty bad compared to how it usually is, though by now, most everybody has the possible iteration memorized. (hint: it’s d20)

  21. ArchU says:

    #19, refugee: you need to think geek to pass the test.

  22. Hermes says:

    Wow, this is awesome!

    …sorry, I don’t have anything else interesting to say. It just is.

  23. Kris says:

    Wow. That’s freaking incredible. I’m doing work in grad school on processing sets of geophysical data, and this way of looking at a set of data and eliminating or adding more data based on gradients and energy content paths sounds like it might be great for noise reduction of data, particularly uncorrelated noise. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

  24. Nyxia says:

    That has got to be about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
    Pure genius!

  25. Nyxia says:

    I take back my previous comment. THIS is in fact the coolest thing I have ever seen:
    http://www2.b3ta.com/vid/lawnmowerdreams.swf
    But, that digital image resizing tool is a very close second. Still cool

  26. Plant says:

    I am as geeky as the next guy, ok, I’m a 50 year old geek mom, but am I the only one who is old enough to be scared by this? We used to say, “Don’t believe everything you read in the paper.” and “A picture is worth a thousand words.” This puts ALL of that in doubt even more than ever. Just think what Chairman Sutler could have done with this!!

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