Image seam carving using depth assisted saliency map

Retargeting algorithms are needed to transfer an image from a device to another with different size and resolution. The goal is to preserve the best visual quality for important objects of the original image. In order to reduce image size, pixels should be removed from less important parts of the image. Therefore, we need an energy function to select less important pixels in seam carving. Various energy functions have been proposed in previous works to minimize the distortion in salient objects. In this paper we combine three different importance maps to form a new energy map. We first use both gradient and depth maps to highlight the values in the saliency map, eventually generates the final energy map. Experimental results using the proposed energy map show better visual appearance in comparison to previous algorithms even at high resizing percentage. The visual artifacts that cause shape deformation in salient objects and deteriorates geometrical consistency of the scene are considerably reduced in our proposed algorithm.