My Inner Academic Nerd Is Gleeful

I am working my ass off.

And, as with the entirety of my professional career, the stuff I’m working my ass off at is only very tangentially related to what I studied in school, and not related at all to what I specialized in.

Just in case you didn’t know, the focus of my last couple of years of university was on image processing and pattern recognition. As you can imagine, being the software architect for a security company doesn’t hit that too much.

But I do like to keep my hand in by keeping up with papers and presentations, and what have you. And today I saw something that just made my inner nerd as happy as a clam.

What I saw was Ariel Shamir‘s SIGGRAPH 2007 paper on Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing. Talking about this in terms of “resizing” is a pretty big understatement, since what they are doing is actually a lot more about a kind of feature extraction that allows images to be “retargeted” to lose uninteresting information, which is useful in content-aware resizing, but there are a lot of other applications, some of which they show in the presentation.

If you want to read the hard academic details, you can read them here, but unless you have some academic nerd credentials in this area I’d recommend just watching the video of the presentation–even if you’re not a nerd in this area, the presentation should blow your mind. They do a great job of making the ideas and technology understandable.

No really, go watch it.