Hybrid seam carving and scaling of images with configurable carving tolerance

摘要

A system and method for expansion and reduction of images uses a hybrid resizing technique combining seam carving and image scaling techniques to reduce or expand an input image. Seam carving techniques may be used to remove or add seams of the image to perform a portion of an overall resizing operation, according to a configurable seam carving tolerance. For example, the technique may only remove and/or replicate a predetermined number or percentage of the lowest-cost seams of the image, or may only remove or replicate the number of low-cost seams needed to achieve a specified percentage of the target resizing operation. The hybrid technique may apply scaling techniques to further resize the image to achieve a target size and/or ratio for the resized image. The hybrid technique may be implemented by program instructions of an image editing application, and the seam carving tolerance may be configurable by a user.