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Comment by mattertater | Hacker News Reader

Seam carving was one of my favorite CS projects I did while in school. This was a cool read, thanks

Never did it in school, but when I came across it as an assignment from a Brown CS class I decided to give it a go on my own, since I'd done Racket stuff at school and new my way around it decently enough. I agree wholeheartedly -- it is just insanely cool.

Literally everything about it. The concept, visualizing intermediate steps by producing a picture that shows the energy of each pixel, then the CS with finding the path, then seeing the image it produces. Just an incredibly interesting (and very modern issue given different screen sizes), a clever algorithm, challenging to implement, visually interesting results... It literally has it all.

100% agreed! I came at it from the angle of someone asking me about real-world applications of dynamic programming. DP is usually covered only in an academic setting, so there's one more plus for seam carving.

dynamic programming shows up a lot in image processing. another cool application is in the image quilting algorithm, where you're trying to synthesize a large texture from a smaller one by stitching together small patches. to reduce the visible seams you can use dynamic programming to find the "best" path through the overlap of two adjacent patches.

here's a link to the paper, which has some cool results to look at: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~efros/research/quilting/qu...

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