Object occlusion guided stereo image retargeting

The resizing of stereo images while preserving salient content and geometric consistency between the image pair is an essential problem to be addressed for 3D visualization. Existing stereo image retargeting techniques are observed to be incurring salient object deformation. In this paper, we formulate a seam carving method to perform stereo image retargeting using graph-cuts having node size as the number of pixels in one of the stereo images. We define the object map with depth ordering of each object from the camera. The seams are allowed to pass along the object-object occlusion boundary at depth discontinuity in order to prevent salient object deformation. We propose adaptive occlusion boundary weights as a function of an object area to be occluded to preserve small objects. The seam passing through object-object occlusion boundary in one image may not follow the exact boundary in the other image. We propose a refinement of the seam to follow object-object occlusion boundary in both the stereo images. By comparing the proposed method with other state-of-the-art stereo image retargeting methods, we show that the proposed method is able to preserve the salient object(s) along with geometric consistency between the stereo image pair.