Seam carving based aesthetics enhancement for photos

•Propose an improved seam carving approach to change the relative positions of the objects in the image.•Be able to maintain the resolution of the image as well as enhance the aesthetics in composition.•Be able to provide better image enhancement quality compared with others.

Recently people are becoming more and more interested in the quality of photographs with the growing interest of image aesthetics. Many previous works start to focus on aesthetically enhancing the quality of images. In this paper, we come up with a novel approach to enhance image aesthetics. An aesthetically beautiful image usually has a clever composition of objects, the optimal positions of which have been deeply discussed by previous methods and reached good performance. After getting the optimal position of the object in images, we try to rearrange all the objects. Instead of picking the object out and pasting it on the suggested place, we propose an improved seam carving approach to change the relative positions of the objects in the image, which is able to move the object to a better place. We adopt the energy function to measure the saliency of each pixel and then find out the seams that should be cut off and inserted. After cutting off unimportant seams by pixel-removing and inserting seams by inpainting, we are able to maintain the resolution of the image as well as enhance the aesthetics in composition. In order to test the effectiveness of our method, we compare the performance of our approach with other state-of-the-art techniques, which well illustrates the satisfying performance of our method.