The seam carving algorithm

["Dylan McCall" <dylanmccall gmail com>]

Hello,

Sorry to burst in here touting "feature suggestions", but this is too cool for me not to.

This here algorithm does everything I have wanted an image editor to be able to do, and more, completely intuitively.

I will let the links explain.

YouTube video (showing enlarging and shrinking, as well as an incredible object removal technique)

Lots of links
 (and a nice example image). Particularly nice is that there is indeed a free plugin for GIMP.

I use F-Spot fairly happily, but I have never been a fan of its image editor. What is neat about this algorithm is the number of possibilities it unlocks, all under a single neat concept of finding and expanding seams.
An implementation of it would serve F-Spot's editor very, very well. I think this because it is a single tool that does a lot of stuff "for the user", in a reasonably transparent way. (Something which is definitely what we want here, since F-Spot strives to have a simple, accessible array of manipulation tools). This would also be fantastically cool if combined with that face recognition SoC project...

Finally, I think seam carving fits in as more an artistic feature than classic resizing or cropping. An accessible image editor like F-Spot's has to be really easy to pick up and use; people should be able to quickly use F-Spot to make the changes they /imagine/ with single steps. Someone who is not really used to image editing would expect (or at least hope) a resize operation to behave more like the seam carving algorithm, since it seems the more intuitive and natural behaviour.

Of course, seam carving doesn't work for everything and can mess up big time. "Smart resize" and "Resize" could do for the naming convention, but I
wonder if the program could detect whether seam carving has changed the
image too significantly?

This would probably be fiddly to implement in a way that doesn't confuse people too much.
Worthy of pondering, though!

Bye,
-Dylan McCall

PS:
If those links didn't come through, they are, in order:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc&eurl=http%253A%252F%252Fkoke%252Eamedias%252Eorg%252Farticles%252F2007%252F08%252F22%252Famazing%252Dnew%252Dimage%252Dresizing%252Dtechnology%252F
http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/09/open_source_seam_carving.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558