We Tried to Make Seam Carving Fast on a GPU. Then We Proved Why It Can't Be.
Full paper: seam_carving.pdf · Code: YuXiangLo/NTUPDP2026 Joint work with Ya-Chen Wu and Yu-Hsiang Lo, NTU Parallel Programming, Spring 2026. The Starting Point Seam carving is a content-aware image resizing algorithm. Instead of cropping or scaling, it removes the least important pixel paths — seams — from the image, leaving the interesting parts intact. The results look surprisingly good. The algorithm has two heavy stages. First, compute an energy map (gradient magnitude, one pass over the image). Then, run a dynamic program (DP) to find the lowest-energy connected path from top to bottom. Remove the seam. Repeat. ...