I love learning about new technology, even if it is not available for me to use yet. I especially like it if it challenges the way I traditionally think about solving a problem. The tool I am about to share fits both categories: it is not available for the public and it certainly changed the way I think about resizing images.
Whether working on the Web or preparing images for printing, we are constantly working to get our images to be the right size. The typical ways we do this are through cropping and scaling. Each of these methods, however, can have their own drawbacks. For instance, scaling an image larger than it was intended can result in either pixilation (when making it larger) or in trivializing the subject (when making it smaller). Cropping can overcome this by giving you the power to select the subject to focus on, but when there are multiple subjects in the picture, your choices are again limited.
Here is a proposed solution that allows for images to be resized dynamically while allowing the subjects to retain their integrity and relationship to one another. The creators, Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan, refer to this as "content aware resizing of images" or "retargeting." Their technique "allows resizing while adapting the image content and layout." My words here will not do the technique justice so check out the video below to get an idea of what is going on. This just confirms to me that we are only on the cusp of the digital image revolution!
Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk
If you are interested in more information in this project, you can read the related paper.