Performance analysis of retargeting pyramid and its applications

Improved retargeting pyramid (iRP) is a multiscale image pyramid using content-aware image resizing (also known as retargeting). It has been reported that the iRP outperforms conventional pyramids in linear approximation and denoising. However, the reason of its performance gain was not well discussed so far. In this paper, we reveal that retargeting in the iRP acts as locally underdecimated filters for significant region(s) while keeping its global downsampling ratio. Furthermore, our iRP is applied to various image processing applications to validate its performance.