Non-uniform Mesh Warping for Content-Aware Image Retargeting

Image retargeting is the process of adapting an existing image to display with arbitrary sizes and aspect ratios. A compelling retargeting method aims at preserving the viewers' experience by maintaining the significant regions in the image. In this paper, we present a novel image retargeting method based on non-uniform mesh warping, which can effectively preserve both the significant regions and the global configuration of the image. The main idea of our method is sampling mesh vertices based on the saliency map, that is to say, we place mesh vertices more densely in the significant regions, defining different quadratic error metrics to measure image distortion and adopting a patch-linking scheme that can better preserve the global visual effect of the entire image. Moreover, to increase efficiency, we formulate the image retargeting as a quadratic minimization problem carried out by solving linear systems. Our experimental results verify its effectiveness.