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This is pretty amazing. The demo video looks very impressive. However, downloaded the application and found it to be much more clunky than the video shows. Certainly has some potential, and does pretty well but far from what the demo shows.
Yes, it is still young. The currently available version uses an edge detection algorithm which I designed for another purpose (text extraction), subsequent versions use techniques which are more appropriate for images. Also, the algorithm never refuses to square an image, even when there is a high likelihood of a poor result; I am experimenting with ways to visually communicate that to the app user.
From the demo video (and the ugly tearing artifacts in the image shown at the end), this looks like someone took seam carving (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving) and made an IOS app from it. This isn't even close to state-of-the-art in image retargetting.
Indeed it is similar to seam carving. Which technique would you recommend for this task? Do you know of any other example implementations which can be run on a smartphone grade processor in near-real-time?