Visual media retargeting

Abstract

The increasing variety of commonly used display devices, especially mobile devices, requires adapting visual media to different resolutions and aspect ratios - a process called "retargeting." The media retargeting problem is further accentuated by the explosion of image and video content on the web. This course presents a comparative overview of the latest research in visual-media retargeting. It focuses on content-aware approaches, which, contrary to traditional scaling and cropping, adapt to the salient information within the image or video and rescale the content while preserving visually important information. Topics include: •Algorithmic details and practical considerations of the retargeting pipeline, including its two main parts (saliency estimation and resizing operators). •Recent trends in retargeting operators, namely discrete graph-based approaches, also known as seam carving. •Continuous methods that operate by image and video warping. •Temporally coherent video retargeting and multi-operator frameworks. The course illuminates the theoretical foundations and practical issues involved in media retargeting, and provides attendees a comprehensive understanding of the state of the art. It includes many live demos of the various resizing techniques.