It’s not too often that you come across a new technology that makes your mouth drop open.
Raoul Pop pointed me to a video demonstration of Content-Aware Image Sizing Demo by Dr. Ariel Shamir (YouTube). I highly recommend taking a look at this. In short software has been written that allows for images to be “retargeted” or “resized while adapting image content and layout”. The cool thing is that this can be done with or without preserving the aspect ratio of the image.
It’s still a little rough, but it looks like this will have a lot of useful applications particularly in the photo editing and web world. It’s still unclear to me how much processing power is required to employ this type of dynamic resizing, but the huge step forward is undeniable. As they’re dynamically resizing images in the demo you don’t see the final image for too long. I did catch on one image that not everything lines up cleanly. I would imagine this technology would work better on some subjects than others. Hopefully this is something that is refined, adopted and integrated in to more widely available photo editing applications.
Technorati Tags: photography, digital, Dr. Ariel Shamir, retarget, retargeting, content-aware, image, resizing, demo
Raoul
on August 22 2007
Thanks Jim! I agree that it still needs work, but wow! If they get it working at a professional level, this is something that will completely revolutionize the way we crop and size images.
latoga
on August 25 2007
Thanks for sharing this Jim/Raoul (giving Jim first first credit just because I happened to read his blog first…)
Raw is a good term for this, but a very interesting way of resizing…and damn impressive demonstration. The real challenge I see is how to make it automatic or quick to define how to do the resize…we all know how many photos we take, image having to spend even an extra 15 seconds per photo do define a “dynamic resize profile”. Yikes!