Content aware image distance measure for joint use of seam carving and non-homogeneous warping

A content aware image distance measure for joint use of seam carving and warping was proposed. Firstly, important pixels in the original image were extracted. After a seam was removed, the important pixels were updated. For the preserved important pixels, the average difference of sub images (ADSI) was computed. For the removed pixels, the average lost energy (ALE) was computed correspondingly. Finally, the important information deformation function (IIDF) was defined by combining ADSI with ALE. If IIDF satisfies the designed terminating condition, seam carving was terminated and non-homogeneous warping was used to get the image of a target size. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can remove unimportant regions while incurring less deformation to important regions and also keeps the aspect ratio of important objects closer to that in the original image.