Smart image editing
First off, since I already mentioned web-based photoshop, here’s an update (don’t worry, there’s a video, you won’t need to read anything).
Second, here’s a hot video demoing some content-aware image resizing research first presented at SIGGRAPH 2007. It’s a fairly simple idea that works surprisingly well.
Normally when you shrink an image you either make the whole thing smaller, or crop some content from the sides. Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan take a different approach which they call “seam carving”.
As the video explains, seam carving is similar to removing the least important rows and columns from the middle of an image. Instead of removing rows and columns, however, their algorithm identifies paths of unimportant pixels. These paths tend to curve around objects, so when removed, they shrink the image in way that’s not very noticeable. Basically you end up shrinking an image by removing the space between objects, but not changing the size of the objects themselves.
If you have some images you need to resize intelligently, a rather pricey photo shop plugin is available here. Alternatively, here’s a free plugin for GIMP (which is also free).
Finally, if you’re still hungry for more content-aware image editing, here’s a paper by Microsoft researcher Antonio Criminisi. Sadly there’s no flashy video, but the images in the paper do give some very impressive examples of how their algorithm automatically fills in missing regions of images. By filling in a missing region, one can also delete entire objects from a scene, remove overlaid text, or stitch together partially overlapping photos.