Perceptually Aware Image Retargeting for Mobile Devices

Retargeting aims at adapting an original high-resolution photograph/video to a low-resolution screen with an arbitrary aspect ratio. Conventional approaches are generally based on desktop PCs, since the computation might be intolerable for mobile platforms (especially when retargeting videos). Typically, only low-level visual features are exploited, and human visual perception is not well encoded. In this paper, we propose a novel retargeting framework that rapidly shrinks a photograph/video by leveraging human gaze behavior. Specifically, we first derive a geometry-preserving graph ranking algorithm, which efficiently selects a few salient object patches to mimic the human gaze shifting path (GSP) when viewing a scene. Afterward, an aggregation-based CNN is developed to hierarchically learn the deep representation for each GSP. Based on this, a probabilistic model is developed to learn the priors of the training photographs that are marked as aesthetically pleasing by professional photographers. We utilize the learned priors to efficiently shrink the corresponding GSP of a retargeted photograph/video to maximize its similarity to those from the training photographs. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that: 1) our method requires less than 35 ms to retarget a 1024x768 photograph (or a 1280x720 video frame) on popular iOS/Android devices, which is orders of magnitude faster than the conventional retargeting algorithms; 2) the retargeted photographs/videos produced by our method significantly outperform those of its competitors based on a paired-comparison-based user study; and 3) the learned GSPs are highly indicative of human visual attention according to the human eye tracking experiments.