Content-Aware Rotation

Kaiming He, Huiwen Chang, Jian Sun; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 553-560

We present an image editing tool called Content-Aware Rotation. Casually shot photos can appear tilted, and are often corrected by rotation and cropping. This trivial solution may remove desired content and hurt image integrity. Instead of doing rigid rotation, we propose a warping method that creates the perception of rotation and avoids cropping. Human vision studies suggest that the perception of rotation is mainly due to horizontal/vertical lines. We design an optimization-based method that preserves the rotation of horizontal/vertical lines, maintains the completeness of the image content, and reduces the warping distortion. An efficient algorithm is developed to address the challenging optimization. We demonstrate our content-aware rotation method on a variety of practical cases.