Seam Carving-based Image Partial Enlargement Method for Perceptual Impression Reflection
Naohiko Ishikawa, Zhenyang Zhu, Jong‐Nam Kim, Xiaoyang Mao · 2024
In addressing the issue that the Thing of Interest (ToI) in a photograph appears significantly smaller than that being directly perceived from that in the physical world, image editing techniques have been developed to enlarge ToI while maintaining appearance of other areas. However, these methods can suffer from issues such as loss of spatial perception, distortions of objects, the lack of automation, etc. To address these issues, we propose a novel ToI enlarging method based on Seam Carving method. The proposed method is composed of seam insertion and deletion processing, and introduces wide area seam energy mechanism, which considers impact of inserted or deleted seams on adjacent areas, in addition to preservation to salient objects, image structure, gradient and mask energies. Moreover, the proposed method introduces the Segment Anything Model to automatically generate masks representing the ToI. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted two subjective evaluation experiments in this study. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can produce resulting images that reflect perceptual impressions, and can preserve area other than ToI.