Seam carving extension: A compression perspective

There is an increasing demand on image compression adaptive to different display sizes. However, existing spatial scalable coding only supports dyadic resolutions and is not content-aware. In this paper, we apply the recently developed image resizing algorithm, seam carving, for content-aware multi-size image compression. Our proposed codec encodes an image into a content-aware progressive bitstream that allows decoding into arbitrary display resolution. In addition, seam insertion is incorporated into the proposed framework to improve the performance in low bitrate image transmission applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first applicable content-aware multi-size image coding work in literature.