Some great graphics technologies are emerging lately.
One that looks very promising is Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs.
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
“Seam carving” allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping.
The algorithm looks for seams (not simple columns or rows) of pixels with the ‘least energy’ (least contrast / change in detail) both vertically and horizontally in the image and then uses this to enable resizing without losing important image content such as human subjects or other detail.
This technique can also be used to manually remove items from the image which are not wanted as well as protect items that absolutely need to be preserved.
