Seam carving

Have you ever tried to fit a picture into a frame that is too small for it? You might have to cut off parts of the picture to make it fit. This is what seam carving does, but instead of a picture, it works on images.

Seam carving is a way of resizing images without squishing or stretching them. It chooses the parts of the image that are less important, or have less detail, and removes them. This is done by finding what are called "seams" in the image. Seams are like paths that go through the image that have the least amount of important pixels.

For example, let's say you have an image of a person standing in front of a plain background. The person is the most important part, so seam carving will try to keep that part of the image intact as much as possible. However, the plain background doesn't have much detail or importance, so seam carving might remove parts of it to make the image smaller.

But how does seam carving know which parts of the image are important and which are not? It uses a technique called "energy mapping" to determine this. Energy mapping is like a heat map that shows which parts of the image have the most activity or detail. By finding the parts of the image with the least energy or activity, seam carving can decide which parts to remove.

Overall, seam carving is a clever way to resize images while keeping the important parts intact. It's like cutting only the parts of the picture that you can't easily see, so that the important parts are left untouched.