A Fast Smart-Cropping Method and Dataset for Video Retargeting

In this paper a method that re-targets a video to a different aspect ratio using cropping is presented. We argue that cropping methods are more suitable for video aspect ratio transformation when the minimization of semantic distortions is a prerequisite. For our method, we utilize visual saliency to find the image regions of attention, and we employ a filtering-through-clustering technique to select the main region of focus. We additionally introduce the first publicly available benchmark dataset for video cropping, annotated by 6 human subjects. Experimental evaluation on the introduced dataset shows the competitiveness of our method.