Fast seam carving using partial update and divide and conquer method

A variety of display devices with different resolutions and aspect ratios require image resizing while preserving the image´s important information. Among the many available techniques, the seam carving method is the most promising due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the optimal seam carving method takes a long computation time due to its nature of sequential processing. This paper proposes two approaches to accelerate the original seam carving method. One is to update the cumulative minimum energy map (CMEM) partially around the seam and another is to process several seams using the divide and conquer (DNC) method. The proposed methods are about 2 ~ 5 times faster than the original seam carving method, while preserving the image´s information as effectively as the original seam carving method.