Today while browsing Digg I came across an interesting video presentation (shown below) that talks about next generation image resizing techniques. The primary focus for such techniques is to combat today’s wide variety of multimedia devices and screen resolutions. In essence, images today don’t degrade across different screen resolutions adequately, rather they just become smaller and harder to see. Therefore it seems more beneficial to crop and re-target the image to focus on the important elements. According to the video the most practical way to do this is by a using a complex set of algorithms. These algorithms determine what parts of the image are “important” and then snip “less-important” parts as needed.

As a designer who has been taught to never stretch an image out of scale it’s hard for me to see this technique working well and looking good. But I do have to admit the video offers some compelling evidence that, if refined, could offer an answer to resolution independent image viewing. Either way, apparently Adobe feels this could be the future because they just snapped up one of the co-creators of the project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk[/youtube]