SeamCrop: changing the size and aspect ratio of videos

The resizing of videos is currently in high demand due to the popularity of mobile devices with very small screen sizes. As the screen resolution of these devices increases, the resizing is mostly needed to change the aspect ratio of the videos to fit the display size. In this paper we present a novel and fast approach for the retargeting of videos which combines cropping and seam carving. The idea is to find an optimal cropping window and to get more useful content into it by additionally removing seams. We formulate the search for a cropping window in terms of a 2D rectangle representing the possible positions of the window over all frames. Finding the optimal position can be solved efficiently with dynamic programming. A user study was conducted that compares our approach to a similar state-of-the-art video retargeting technique, showing that our new algorithm has fast computation times while also having a comparable quality of results.

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