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Multi-operator image retargeting with visual quality preservation of salient regions

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Abstract

Most of the existing content-aware retargeting algorithms are prone to introduce geometric distortions or information loss undesirably in salient regions of resized images, especially for pictures with visually important content taking up a lot of space. The main reason is that these algorithms rescale photos only toward the horizontal or vertical direction when shrinking the width or height of the original image. To address this issue, we propose a width-height synchronization resizing strategy and integrate it into a multi-operator retargeting method that combines three techniques: indirect seam carving, uniform scaling, and direct seam carving based on gradient vector flow (GVF). Moreover, we also develop a novel algorithm to determine the switching point from one retargeting technique to another, with low computational overhead. Besides, we design a novel method that achieves the weighted parameter of scaling adaptively, improving the robustness of the retargeting algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing approaches in the quality of retargeted images.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi, China (no. 2021GXNSFAA220058).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Electronics Information, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi, China

    Zhenhua Tang, Jiemei Yao, Qian Zhang & Yuanting Luo

  2. Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communication and Network Technology, Nanning, Guangxi, China

    Zhenhua Tang

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  1. Zhenhua Tang
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  2. Jiemei Yao
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  3. Qian Zhang
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  4. Yuanting Luo
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Correspondence to Zhenhua Tang.

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Communicated by P. Pala.

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Tang, Z., Yao, J., Zhang, Q. et al. Multi-operator image retargeting with visual quality preservation of salient regions. Multimedia Systems 29, 811–829 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-022-01023-4

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