[andersource]

That's quite an insight!

Actually the authors of the seam carving paper went on to do just that [0]. From the abstract: "We present video retargeting using an improved seam carving operator. Instead of removing 1D seams from 2D images we remove 2D seam manifolds from 3D space-time volumes. To achieve this we replace the dynamic programming method of seam carving with graph cuts that are suitable for 3D volumes."

[0] https://faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/index.html

[crazygringo]

Son of a gun, this is why I love HN. Thank you! And it turns out the results are shockingly good, far better than I expected. They have demo videos at:

https://faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/results/video_re...

My favorite is:

Original: https://faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/results/videos/w...

Narrowed: https://faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/results/videos/w...

Widened: https://faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/results/videos/w...

Just wow.

[andersource]

Gladly! And yeah, the results really are quite good. This is why I like optimization problems - if you can formally capture what you want as an objective, and if you can find a way to optimize it, you can get surprisingly good results. Of course these are two very big IFs...

[rijoja]

Interesting.