Everyone who has ever worked with digital images know that you resize an image either by cropping it (and potentially lose important parts of the image) or shrinking it (and lose size or contend with a distorted image).
Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Herzliya, Israel, shows us another way: content-aware "smart" image sizing, where you can have your "image cake" and eat it too (you'll see what I mean):
Retargeting is a new technology focused on solving problems with changing sizesof digital photography, while traditional crops often fails to include all elements and resize may make the image too small to distinguish, retargeting, using an algorithm, recognizes what's relevant to the image, and column by column of pixels are removed.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Dr. Shamir's website - Thanks therror!
http://rsizr.com/about/gallery/ for example images
If you are looking for a software to try out seam carving, take a look at www.thegedanken.com/retarget
The program that you can download there (for Windows and Linux, and free) is already highly optimized concerning speed, and apart from enlarging or decreasing image size you can also use masks to protect or delete certain parts of your image.
Have fun,
Irmgard