Visual preserving video retargeting with deformable shape consistency

Video retargeting is a technique that resizes the aspect ratio and resolution of a video in a content aware manner. There are three main challenges in the video retargeting: visual saliency preservation, deformation prevention and temporal consistency preservation. Existing video retargeting methods can be roughly classified into seam carving based methods and warping based methods. These methods effectively protect important regions in video, but can hardly deal with deformations and temporal incoherence, especially for videos whose foreground and background are both in motion. In this paper, we propose a novel shape preserving video retargeting method to reduce deformations and maintain temporal consistency via matching salient curves in the video frames. Our method transforms the anti-deformation and temporal consistency problems in video retargeting into a curve matching cost minimization problem. By incorporating a deformation cost and temporal inconsistency cost into the seam carving framework, the quality of the retargeted videos can be significantly improved. Experimental results also show that the proposed method achieves better performance compared with other two state-of-the-art methods.