You are working on a layout and the image doesn’t fit. You can’t crop it unless you lose important parts and you can’t stretch or compress the axis because it would look unnatural. Or you need to enlarge without softening.

Seam carving to the rescue.

Imaging taking a 4X3 image and streching it to 16X9 with great resutts? The softwre application actualy inserts or removes pixels to make your image wider with no distortion.

It is easier to see than describe.

“A seam is an optimal path of pixels on a single image from top to bottom, or left to right, where optimality is defined by an image energy function. By repeatedly carving out or inserting seams in one direction we can change the aspect ratio of an image.”

http://www.seamcarving.com/

http://www.merl.com/projects/mediaretargeting

Right now it only works on still images but video is next. Imagine automatically taking all the 4X3 stuff in the world and making it all 16X9.