Saliency-driven scaling optimization for image retargeting

This paper proposes a saliency-weighted scaling factor energy for image retargeting. Considering that salient objects should be scaled with a larger scaling factor with respect to nonsalient regions, we define a quadric energy to establish the relation between the scaling factor of a local region and its saliency. The quadric energy is the weighted sum of the square of scaling factors, where the weight of each scaling factor is inversely proportional to its corresponding saliency. Furthermore, a triangle similarity quadric energy is introduced to prevent salient regions from distortion. Compared to previous methods, our approach not only preserves the shapes of salient objects and the integrity of the whole image well, but also reserves more resolution to salient objects in target image even when the aspect ratio is unchanged. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.