Geometrically consistent stereo seam carving

Image retargeting algorithms attempt to adapt the image content to the screen without distorting the important ob-jects in the scene. Existing methods address retargeting of a single image. In this paper we propose a novel method for retargeting a pair of stereo images. Naively retargeting each image independently will distort the geometric struc-ture and make it impossible to perceive the 3D structure of the scene. We show how to extend a single image seam carv-ing to work on a pair of images. Our method minimizes the visual distortion in each of the images as well as the depth distortion. A key property of the proposed method is that it takes into account the visibility relations between pixels in the image pair (occluded and occluding pixels). As a re-sult, our method guarantees, as we formally prove, that the retargeted pair is geometrically consistent with a feasible 3D scene, similar to the original one. Hence, the retargeted stereo pair can be viewed on a stereoscopic display or pro-cessed by any computer vision algorithm. We demonstrate our method on a number of challenging indoor and outdoor stereo images. 1