Content-aware video retargeting using object-preserving warping

A novel content-aware warping approach is introduced for video retargeting. The key to this technique is adapting videos to fit displays with various aspect ratios and sizes while preserving both visually salient content and temporal coherence. Most previous studies solve this spatiotemporal problem by consistently resizing content in frames. This strategy significantly improves the retargeting results, but does not fully consider object preservation, sometimes causing apparent distortions on visually salient objects. We propose an object-preserving warping scheme with object-based significance estimation to reduce this unpleasant distortion. In the proposed scheme, visually salient objects in 3D space-time space are forced to undergo as-rigid-as-possible warping, while low-significance contents are warped as close as possible to linear rescaling. These strategies enable our method to consistently preserve both the spatial shapes and temporal motions of visually salient objects and avoid overdeformations on low-significance objects, yielding a pleasing motion-aware video retargeting. Qualitative and quantitative analyses, including a user study and experiments on complex videos containing diverse cameras and dynamic motions, show a clear superiority of our method over related video retargeting methods.