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Liquid Resize - Content Aware Image Resizing Software
September 21, 2007
Do you believe in synchronicity? I've been reading the Einstein biography lately and thinking I should really work harder at trying to be a genius when all of a sudden I received an E-mail from Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger, a physicist in Vienna. Hmmm.
The E-mail was in response to a post we had about an amazing video that showed a way to resize images using "seam carving" to reduce distortion when manipulating pixels. Seems that there is software available, called Liquid Resize, that can do a lot of what's in that video. I asked Irmgard for more details and here's what she wrote back:
- There are 2 persons involved in the development of Liquid Resize - my husband, Ramin Sabet, who's doing the bulk of the programming and me, Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger, who's helping with the tricky bits and all around. We have both studied physics (here in Vienna/Austria, where we also live), but have afterwards turned our joint hobby into our profession and have thus been working (at separate companies) in the computer industry for a couple of years.
We saw the video by Shamir and Avidan very shortly after they had presented the new idea of seam carving at this years SigGraph, then read their paper and were absolutely fascinated by the idea. The only problem at that time was that we could find no software at all on the net so that we could try out this technique - and thus we decided to write our own program based on these ideas. Since then, this project keeps us quite busy in the after-work hours.
Our very first try was a Python application, but we soon realized that this was way too slow and light years away from real-time resizing. So we decided to go back to our roots and write a C++ application (using wxWidgets for the user interface to be able to support various platforms). As soon as the program was stable (and usable), we published the first version on www.thegedanken.com/retarget and have since updated it as often as we could as many comments from different users were really encouraging.
Apart from the goal of implementing all that was presented in the paper and adding features requested by users, we are currently also investing quite some time and effort to optimize the application for performance so that it can be used in real life.
The program is currently free for download at our website, for both Windows and Linux. We do plan to offer a Mac version as well, but this is not so easy for us since we do not have a Mac at home, and thus we have not tackled this task yet.
As for our release plans, these will highly depend on what the future holds in terms of feedback and user interest. A lot of people have requested the source code (which we haven't published, in part because the code still undergoes a lot of changes as we add new features and optimizations), others have wondered why the program isn't commercial. I guess we will make this decision once we're sufficiently satisfied with Liquid Resize :-)
Well I guess everyone's gone liquid resize crazy these days. So have a look, download and enjoy!
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