Seam carving free download software and demos

felicia · VSO Team Member Joined: 23 Jul 2009 Posts: 12

What is seam carving?
(developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir) is a method for content-aware image resizing, which means that you can shrink or enlarge an image while the important features stay unaffected.
Seam carving publication
or Wikipedia description

So, what is a seam?
A seam is like a one water-drop that slides down the mountain, like the water-drop the seam takes the less energy resistant path avoiding the edges of the objects in the image. If you remove one seam you shrink the image by one pixel.

So I removed one seam now what?
Easy, you remove another, and then another until you reach the desired size or you can add seams until you expand the image enough.

Can I do anything else with seams?
Yes! You can use a mask to mark which portions of the image you want to protect or remove as shown below.

So I can remove everything on a picture?
Not really, you have to understand the seams a little, if you try to remove an object that takes up half of the image there’ll be trouble, but the only way to know if you try, so have fun.

It’s that all?
No, you can also make caricature/cartoon portraits, but we’ll see that another day Wink

You can download VSO Seam carving's Download free seam carving software - here

New - You can watch an overview of the program Here.

Click on the image above to watch the video.

Source image

Energy image with a seam following the less energy resistant path -yes seams are lazy Wink

felicia · VSO Team Member Joined: 23 Jul 2009 Posts: 12

Removing objects

Here we have an animation where we remove one book from the shelf each frame.

Next we remove the street sign from the picture.
Before:

After:

We can also remove the recycling bin from the next picture
Before :

After :

Finally we can remove the lights from this picture.
Before :

After :

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felicia · VSO Team Member Joined: 23 Jul 2009 Posts: 12

A day at the beach

We start from this image

First lets see an animation of the process

The same animation with the actual seams

Notice the green mask covering the bar in the second frame ? thanks to it there won't be any deformation.

We can also make the image wider, from 800px to 1400px.
with one step :

With two steps :

Or with 3 steps :

And the same transformation with a normal stretch :

If we compare the 3 steps output with the stretched image, we see that seam carving keeps the objects proportions.

Finally, if we want we can remove the persons from the image with the help of the mask (red parts of the image)

1 person removed :

2 peolple removed :

3 peolple removed :

That concludes our day at the beach.

felicia · VSO Team Member Joined: 23 Jul 2009 Posts: 12

New - You can watch an overview of the program Here.

Click on the image above to watch the video.

JoeB · Joined: 02 Jul 2007 Posts: 2866 Location: Canada

It works very well. However, would it be possible to add a Save As option to save in some lossless format - e.g., png or tif? Jpeg is lossy, and the only workaround at present is to screen capture the output and paste into a graphic editor.

Regards,

JoeB

felicia · VSO Team Member Joined: 23 Jul 2009 Posts: 12

For now the developement of the seam carving tool is on halt, but as soon as it's restarted your request will be included.

Thank you for your interest.

Br,

Felicià