Deep learning-based importance map for content-aware media retargeting

We introduce a deep learning-driven framework for creating an adaptably applicable importance map (A2R-Map) that can be integrated with existing image and video retargeting operators. A conventional retargeting algorithm uses a heuristic approach to seek an off-the-self algorithm used into their retargeting system. The extracted importance map of the image does not match the characteristics of the input image; therefore, it affects the retargeting results and limits the performance of the retargeting method. Our designed framework attempts to minimize the artifacts/distortions caused by inappropriate energy, e.g., the shrunk phenomenon in warping-based results and carving-through-object distortion in the seam carving-based approach. Our proposed framework focuses on capturing sensitive distortion regions and activating their energy to solve this challenge. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme by plugging it in three typical retargeting methods: seam carving-based, warping-based for image, and video retargeting. Extensive experiments and evaluations are conducted on two widely used databases. On the one hand, A2R-Map significantly reduces the time of importance map generation in retargeting systems to \(\sim 9\) $\sim 9$ times compared to the baseline saliency map. On the other hand, our A2R-Map achieves improvement over the baseline methods with an average of 11% and 9% in terms of image and video quality, respectively. The experimental results and evaluations demonstrate that our strategy for A2R-Map substantially outperforms the previous works and significantly boosts the visual quality of video/image retargeting.