Gabe Is Coding

Seam Carving GUI Speedy Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Well, it's been a while since the last release of the Seam Carving GUI. Brain_Recall recently put some more work into makeing CAIR more multi-threaded when possible claiming performance improvements of 30-70%.
Some of these changes were in the 1.10 release, but unfortuntately, that broke the Mac OS X build as he used some posix semaphores (which apparently are not supported in Mac, although seemgly compile). So for the 1.11 update I ported CAIR 2.19 to the mac by using some cross-platform trickery.

Also, I used the opportunity to make ramses build scripts (another project of mine) for the project and Qt 4.5.2 for msvc from qt-msvc-installer (yet another project of mine). The results are that you gain the benifit of the MSVC 2008 optimizing compiler for more speed and a sparkley, shortcut making windows installer for more convenience.

Get the latest now and experience the speed improvements from multiple fronts.

Seam Carving GUI Revivied

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:38:00 +0000

I received a source update from Brain_ReCall (Joe) including his updated CAIR v.2.15.1 and the following:

Features:

Foward Energy Parameter
Progress bar when running HD Quality

Bugs:

Retain/Remove/Clear brush cursor now properly scales with the image zoom level

Also, I took into consideration some feedback I received and added the following improvements:

Save/Load of the Mask now available (as a .png)
The Mask is saved/restored during Undo/Redo operations
Shortcuts use Qt's platform specific definitions (hopefully allowing them to work on Mac)
Upgraded to Qt 4.4.1 (hopefully allowing for better performance)

As usual, get the latest source and binaries at the seam-carving-gui download page.

Relicense and Update Seam Carving GUI

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:25:00 +0000

Well, demand has been pretty steady for the Seam Carving GUI so I've gone ahead and updated it to the latest version of CAIR. Joe says there should be some model performance improvements and possibly some behavior fixes.

Last week a link to the Google Code page for the application made it pretty high (6th or 7th) on programming.reddit.com which brought in a flurry of traffic :) I hope some people found the program useful.

I have relicensed the program as GPL v2.0 and Joe will be relicensing CAIR as LGPL v2.1 (and gave me permission to redistribute it under that license). This came after a commenter notified us of the incompatibility of GPL v3.0 and Qt4 from Trolltech which is GPL v2.0. Apparently v2 and v3 are incompatible licenses. I find in unfortunate that an open source license is creating these types of divisions and inconveniences in the free software community, but the folks in the GPL v3 camp are vary passionate about the IP stuff that the v3 license protects even to the detriment of license compatibility.

As usual, get the latest source and binaries at the seam-carving-gui download page.

What's That? More Seam Carving Craziness?

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:49:00 +0000

They just don't stop coming: more for those in the liquid resizing/content aware image resizing/seam carving implementation scene.

Brain_Recall gets most of the credit for this one, as he modified his source and the GUI and sent me the update. I added some tool-tips, tried to make the GUI more user friendly and cleaned up some of the implementation.

New goodies:

HD Quality parameter which produces better results when decreases both dimensions of an image but is more computationally expensive.
Add Weight/Weight Scale parameters. These were hard coded before, now you can play around with them although the defaults should work in most cases.
Removed Marked button - will shrink an image enough to remove a red area marked for removal and then stretch it back to the original dimensions. The classic "get that guy out of my photo" solution.

As usual, get the latest source and binaries at the seam-carving-gui download page.

Seam Carving GUI Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:35:00 +0000

That's right folks even more updates. I really didn't expect this project to get so much attention, but I'm a sucker for making things the people use, and then making them better for the users.

Improvements:

Upgraded to CAIR 2.6.1 (considerably faster!)
Can view images horizontal energy function as well as vertical (in the View menu)
Created a cursor when hovering over the image to represent the mark area size
Retain/Remove mask is also shrunk with the image so you can see how effective it is and can resize in increments without re-marking the mask areas
You can select to erase areas marked green/red (retain/remove), i.e. an mask eraser tool
Mac build now includes JPEG support

Building a distributable package for the Mac turns out to be a non-trivial thing. Especially when you want independent Qt4 frameworks and image plugins loaded from within the application bundle. I wrote a script included in the source distribution that does the dirty work to make it easier in the future. It was really quite painfull to get it right, so maybe someone else can use this project as an example and save themselves some headache.

I've also created a Google Code project seam-carving-gui to host the binaries etc. Also I uploaded new screenshots at my static page. No use filling up space here.

New Seam Carving GUI Download Page

New Backend for the Seam Carving GUI

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:53:00 +0000

The original seam carving algorithm implementation that I based the Seam Carving GUI on was written as a quick and dirty project by Andy Owen. Andy has moved onto other things and I got an email from Brain_Recall (Joe) who was working on a more true to the paper implementation of the algorithm with his own optimizations (called CAIR). Joe’s work as really matured into some nice optimized, mutli-threaded code and produced much nicer results. Most noticeable is the resizing images to larger dimensions than the original.

So I modified the GUI to use CAIR (newest version on sf.net) and take advantage of its new features. I also threw in some itch features.

New features

Can set a quality parameter that gives you a quality/time tradeoff when resizing
View algorithm metrics on the image: grayscale, edge, and energy
Can specify weights (intensities) for retain/remove regions
2-3X faster (especially on multi-core machines)
Undo/Repeat

Here is a screenshot of the GUI:

To give you an idea of the quality of CAIR, here are some more resized versions of the ball image.

Download Links:

Update: All Downloads Now at the seam-carving-gui project Download Page

Update: Sorry for all the mess with the Mac version. First I didn't bundle in Qt, then my upload continuously failed to the static Goggle Pages host.

Update: The new mac build should include JPEG support. Get it at the download page linked above.

Updates for the Retargeting GUI

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:22:00 +0000

It's always nice to find out a project you threw together is being used. It seems that although other development efforts around the web have sprung up around the content-aware image resizing, people like having a stand-alone, easy to run implementation.

Improvements to this release:

You can mark areas of the image that you would like to retain/remove with a paint style mouse gesture.
JPG support (built into the windows binary)
I am now using the Qt Graphics View Framework, which should make image handing (zooming etc) a bit snappier.
Update: I got notified of a few bugs, so I fixed those using valgrind
Update: While I was at it, I implemented copy and paste in windows

Still things that could be done:

Various algorithm speed improvements
Copy and Paste [Update: completed in latest build]
Anything else you guys suggest

I'm on the lookout for people who have written more efficient and true to the paper seam carving algorithms to improve the back-end. So if you are such a person, or know of such an implementation on the web, give me a heads up.

Again the download links are

Update: All Downloads Now at the seam-carving-gui project Download Page

Here are some images showing the program in action...

A nice castle image before any retargeting:

Mark areas that we want to remove and we want retain, in this case we want to make sure the castle is not distorted and remove the pesky pedestrian:

The re targeted image, pretty slick eh?

Update: The latest version is no longer based on Andy's implementation but CAIR. See the seam-carving-gui project page for more.

Content Aware Image Resizing - A Seam Carving GUI

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 04:29:00 +0000

I built a simple Seam Carving GUI as a GUI front end to the implementation of the Seam Carving algorithm by Andy Owen[1].

I ran into Andy's comment to the Slashdot article about Content-Aware Image Resizing[2] and decided his late night hack was worth looking into. And hey, it worked! After a few days of seeing the impressive demonstration video about the SIGGRAPH paper on seam carving I found myself going back to Andy's implementation to manually grind some images through his C code and began thinking, lets get some GUI going on here!

So there you have it, two nights of feverish coding later (one with a slightly hindering amount of wine consumed during a MythBusters viewing session) and I have something to ship.

Enjoy, if you have any questions or suffer from the undeniable urge to lavishly complement this quick hack of a GUI, or more likely would like bellow your complaints about something your getting for free, you can reach me at gaberudy+seamcarving at gmail.com

TODO:

Copy and Paste
Drag and Drop
Do any sort or optimization of Andy's image stuff
Do the bit where you mark parts of the image to preserve or make go away
Read the paper and make it really work!

DOWNLOAD:

Update: All Downloads Now at the seam-carving-gui project Download Page

Build instructions and screenshots: here

[1] Andy is the nicest (and only) Australian I've ever met on the internet, I got his permission to do a GUI around his resizing code and he was very supportive, even adding in a feature or two for the cause.

[2] His was actually one of two comments that had links to quickly written code, but it was plain to see that Andy's was the proper implementation to follow up on as it received a (+5 Interesting) vs. the(+4 Interesting). Tsk tsk, not to mention the other link was cold dead.

Update: The latest version is no longer based on Andy's implementation but CAIR. See the seam-carving-gui project page for more.