"Seam Carving" for content-aware image resizing (amazing video)

This may be my first ever link to / post about a YouTube-hosted video...

Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing

For those who haven't seen it already, Drs. Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan showed off their algorithms/app at the most recent SIGGRAPH. With their technology, you can smartly resize an image disproportionately -- that is, without locking height/width together while scaling. You can also smartly "mask" unwanted parts of an image, and the algorithms simply remake the image as if that part was never there. (Shamir's site is painfully slow to load, but you can watch the QuickTime video there; I recommend the YouTube version)

The ethical implications are huge, of course, for those in photojournalistic or scientific arenas -- but for the rest of us this could be pretty big stuff. As far as panoramas go, I can see in this another & possibly better method for removing ghosts and seams. Watch the movie through to the end to see what I mean.

Cheers,

Patrick