Stereo seam carving a geometrically consistent approach

Image retargeting algorithms attempt to adapt the image content to the screen without distorting the important objects in the scene. Existing methods address retargeting of a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel method for retargeting a pair of stereo images. Naively retargeting each image independently will distort the geometric structure and hence will impair the perception of the 3D structure of the scene. We show how to extend a single image seam carving to work on a pair of images. Our method minimizes the visual distortion in each of the images as well as the depth distortion. A key property of the proposed method is that it takes into account the visibility relations between pixels in the image pair (occluded and occluding pixels). As a result, our method guarantees, as we formally prove, that the retargeted pair is geometrically consistent with a feasible 3D scene, similar to the original one. Hence, the retargeted stereo pair can be viewed on a stereoscopic display or further processed by any computer vision algorithm. We demonstrate our method on a number of challenging indoor and outdoor stereo images.