Seam Carver Project Homepage

This is the homepage for the open source Seamstress seam carving library and Arachne, the seam carving program written to demonstrate the library. They were both written by Hayden Walles.

Seam carving is a technique developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir for resizing images by removing the boring bits (content-aware image resizing as they call it). The examples below were all created in a few seconds with Arachne and give you an idea of some of the things you can do with seam carving. Click on each image for a larger version.

Original image	Narrower	Wider	Swan removed

Seamstress is an independent implementation of seam carving. The Seamstress library is portable and takes care of the details of doing many of the things described by Avidan and Shamir. Others (like image expansion) are easy to implement yourself using the library.

Arachne is a Windows and GTK+ program designed to show off Seamstress at its best. It allows you to do the realtime fluid resizing with any image like that shown in the video above.

Seamstress and Arachne are both open source. If you find either of them useful, do let me know. If something seems wrong, of you have an idea for something that's missing, let me know so I can fix it.

The latest version of Seamstress is 1.0.2. The latest version of Arachne is 1.1.2. See the download page for release notes and changes from previous versions.

• Screenshots
• Download:
  • Arachne (includes Seamstress)
  • Seamstress only
• Documentation:
  • Arachne 1.1.2 User's Guide HTML (online)
  • Seamstress 1.0.x Programmer's Guide HTML (online) PDF
• Sourceforge project page
• Feedback

Future work

Arachne

• Allow user to adjust the zoom level at which the image is displayed.
• Let the current image to be fixed at the current size as the new original allowing sequences of resizes in different directions.
• Make the tool size adjustable.
• Add shortcut keys.
• Continue to extend the file formats that Arachne can read and write (it currently supports TIFF and JPEG)
• Add a built-in crop tool.
• Improve performance and responsiveness with large images.

Seamstress

• Add additional energy functions to Seamstress, and allow the programmer to provide their own.
• Reimplement the existing energy function so that the Unweaver interface can use dynamic energy as well as the Unpicker interface.
• Work on Seamstress's error handling.
• Improve the documentation.

Acknowledgements

None of this would have happened but for my colleague Mike Liddle who introduced me to this technique, spent the better part of a day with me working out how it worked, and put up with my enthusiasm long after his own had faded.

The image "Birds @ Otago Peninsular, New Zealand" used in the examples was taken by flickr user timparkinson (http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/263830393/). This image is distributed under a creative commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en)