Seam Carving GUI is an open source image resizing utility that lets you resize your photos without affecting the focused subject. It does so by removing unwanted visual content in the image by employing a technique known as CAIR (Content Aware Image Resizing). CAIR was developed by Ariel Shamir andShai Avidan, and the application functions on the basis of carving seams in an image. Now, that might sound like technical jargon to some, but seams can be called as non-wanted paths in an image, and we can increase and reduce the size of an image by increase or decreasing the seams. This is a great alternative for cropping and other conventional image resizing techniques. More after the jump.
The program has a simple interface, containing your image workspace area with the tools palette to the right side, although you can position the tools palette anywhere you want on the screen. The application allows resizing by using two different methods; either by removing your marked area, or by retaining it while trashing the rest. In real, it doesn’t actually removes anything rather stitch the image in a technical way, and this is what seam is all about.
As mentioned earlier, you can resize (in actuality, you’re removing unwanted pixels) using image markings by selecting either Mark area for retaining or Mark area for removal. I used the remove method in my testing. To do this, open your image and just select brush size and weight from tools palette by using sliders, and mark area in your image which you want to remove. Removing and retaining brushes are identified by red and green colors, respectively. Under Remove Marked Areas, you can select any of the three different modes (Automatic, Horizontal and Vertical).
On the View menu, you can select different preview settings like Greyscale, Edge, Vertical or Horizontal energy. You can also zoom in and out the image if you want to make changes to delicate areas, or just fine tune your selections. There are other optional parameters you can set, such as Edge Detector (V1, V_SQUARE, Prewitt, Sobian, Laplacian), HD Quality, Forward Energy, Weight Scale (5000 default). You can also change image resolution if you want by putting in width and height dimensions, but I left it to default. Once done, click Remove to start the resizing process.
You can see that from the above image, a yellow line in middle of the road has been removed. In reality, it isn’t removed, but actually resized using seam carving technique, which I discussed at the start of this post.
Even though the program will work if you know what you’re doing, I had mixed results during my testing. Moreover there’s a bug in the program that it won’t show the resized brush while you’re working with your images. which I hope will be sorted out in the next update. The application works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.
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