Interactive content-aware zooming

Abstract

We propose a novel, interactive content-aware zooming operator that allows effective and efficient visualization of high resolution images on small screens, which may have different aspect ratios compared to the input images. Our approach applies an image retargeting method in order to fit an entire image into the limited screen space. This can provide global, but approximate views for lower zoom levels. However, as we zoom more closely into the image, we continuously unroll the distortion to provide local, but more detailed and accurate views for higher zoom levels. In addition, we propose to use an adaptive view-dependent mesh to achieve high retargeting quality, while maintaining interactive performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed operator by comparing it against the traditional zooming approach, and a method stemming from a direct combination of existing works.