Daniel Fortunov's Blog » Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

Seam Carving is a technique for intelligent image resizing that allows images to be automagically re-sized to fit different spaces (for example, different devices, with different amounts of screen real-estate).

Seam Carved Image — Magic!

This is the magic of Seam Carving, as presented at the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

What's more, is that the algorithm can easily be run in reverse, to artificially widen an image.

Take a look at this short demonstration video:

All the geeky details are available in their academic paper, available from www.seamcarving.com.

I found out about this technique when I came across Mike Swanson's proof-of-concept implementation.

(Sample images for this blog post were taken from here.)