Image retargeting using multi-map constrained region warping

Image retargeting aims to adapt images to various screens with small sizes and arbitrary aspect ratios. In this paper, we propose a novel image retargeting approach based on region warping, which emphasizes the image parts with important content while reducing the visual distortion over the whole image. First, the original image is decomposed into homogeneous regions and further represented by curve-edge trapezoid meshes. Then, two kinds of energy maps, importance map and sensitivity map, are calculated by visual attention model and weighted gradient map respectively. With mesh representation and energy map constraints, image retargeting is formulated to a constrained optimization problem of mesh vertexes relocation. Finally, the target image is generated by separately warping the regions based on the deduced optimal solution. The experiments on different images demonstrate the effective and efficiency of our algorithm.