SEAMonster Does Seam Carving

Posted By: Sarah Perez | Nov 28th, 2007 @ 12:54 PM

SEAMonster, a personal project of Mike Swanson's, has nothing to do with the cool SeaDragon technology, despite the similar name. Instead, SEAMonster is an app that lets you perform seam carving on your photos. What is seam carving? It's a photo-resizing algorithim developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir that reduces or enlarges pictures by intelligently removing pixels. If that's a little confusing, this video demos the technique quite well. According to the seamcarving.com website, seam carving removes the pixels that carry little importance - something that is determined by measuring a pixel's contrast when compared to its neighbor pixels, as well as by more advanced techniques. By performing seam carving, you can scale photos by a wide range, while retaining the details. (Normal scaling techniques normally can't go beyond a factor of 2 or less than 0.5.). The SEAMonster application uses Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0, so you'll need that first. When you're ready to get started, check out the 8-minute video intro Mike recorded in lieu of documentation. Amazing stuff! (Thanks to Blake Handler for posting about this).