Improved real-time video resizing technique using temporal forward energy

A novel video resizing algorithm that preserves the dominant contents of video frames is proposed. Because a visual correlation (a similarity) exists on consecutive frames within an identical shot, the energy distribution of the neighboring frames is also correlated and similar, and then the seams in a frame are analogous to those of neighboring frames. Thus, the seams of the current frame are derived from a specified range considering the coordinates of the seams of the previous frame. The proposed method determines the two-dimensional connected paths for each frame by considering both the spatial and temporal correlations between frames to prevent jittering and jerkiness. For this purpose, a new temporal forward energy is proposed as the energy cost of a pixel. The proposed algorithm has a fast processing speed similar to the bilinear method, while preserving the main content of an image to the greatest extent possible. In addition, because the memory usage is remarkably small compared with the existing seam carving method, the proposed algorithm is usable in mobile devices, which have many memory restrictions. Computer simulation results indicate that the proposed technique provides a better objective performance, subjective image quality, and content conservation than conventional algorithms.