I remember implementing this for a class years ago, and then the professor suggested doing the inverse to try to expand the image width. The idea was you would duplicate the lowest energy seam... but all that did was create a lot of repeats of the same seam.
I never did finish that weird idea, but I probably needed to try something like increasing the energy of the chosen seam (and its duplicate)... I may try that again, just because I'm curious what would happen.