Visual Media Retargeting

Saturday, 19 December | 10:45 AM - 2:30 PM | Room 513

The increasing variety of commonly used display devices, especially mobile devices, requires adapting visual media to different resolutions and aspect ratios - a process called "retargeting". The media retargeting problem is further accentuated by the explosion of image and video content on the web. 

This course presents a comparative overview of the latest research in visual-media retargeting. It focuses on content-aware approaches, which, contrary to traditional scaling and cropping, adapt to the salient information within the image or video and rescale the content while preserving visually important information. Topics include:

• Algorithmic details and practical considerations of the retargeting pipeline, including its two main parts (saliency estimation and resizing operators).

• Recent trends in retargeting operators, namely discrete graph-based approaches, also known as seam carving.

• Continuous methods that operate by image and video warping.

• Temporally coherent video retargeting and multi-operator frameworks.

The course illuminates the theoretical foundations and practical issues involved in media retargeting, and provides attendees a comprehensive understanding of the state of the art. It includes many live demos of the various resizing techniques.

Level

Intermediate

Presentation Language

Presented in English

Prerequisites

Knowledge of basic graphics (pixels, video, color), basic mathematics (calculus: functions, derivatives, gradients; algebra: linear systems, minimization), and basic algorithms (graphs, nodes, edges, minimal path).

Instructor(s)

Ariel Shamir 
Efi Arazi School of Computer Science

Olga Sorkine 
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Instructor Bio(s)

Ariel Shamir
Ariel Shamir is a senior lecturer at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel. He received his PhD in computer science in 2000 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has published and presented in journals, tutorials, and lectures in several international conferences. He also has broad commercial experience in managing and consulting with several companies, including Mistubishi Electric and Disney Research. He has co-authored several patents both internationally and in the US, including the patents on seam-carving. 
Olga Sorkine
Olga Sorkine joined the faculty of New York University's computer science department at the Courant Institute in 2008 as an assistant professor. She earned her BSc (2000) and PhD (2006) in computer science from Tel Aviv University. Following her studies, she received the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral research at Technische Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on digital content-creation tasks, such as shape modeling, computer animation, and digital-image manipulation. She received the Eurographics 2008 Young Researcher Award and has presented at various conferences, including SIGGRAPH and Eurographics.