Image Scaling: How Hard Can it Be?

For centuries, human artists have been scaling images by hand, sketching with varying levels of detail depending on the demands. Image scaling is a fundamental image operation and exists for various devices including mobile phones and computers. It has great commercial values and has attracted great efforts in research. In this article, we suggest a stretch-shrink based framework for image scaling which imitates the work of a human artist. This can be done by firstly representing the image with line segments (sketches) and then stretching or shrinking the length of the representing segments under proper ratios to achieve the desired scaling. Through extensive experiments, this framework exhibits the prominent ability to achieve high quality scaled images efficiently with less storage consumption.