I stumbled across this video and was thinking, how does this work? There is also a flash version online, but after doing a couple of images myself, I cannot for the life of me figure it out.
It's kind of difficult to explain. It might be called something else, but I've only heard of it as image retargeting.
That only way I can describe it is like a dynamic image. The author in the video removed people from a picture, by what looks like cropping and resizing. It was done it a matter of seconds.
EDIT: The author in the video calls it "Content Aware Image Resizing"
It looks impressive. I would have thought that removing 'redundant' pixels in a non uniform way (horizontally, vertically and diagonally) would lead to much distortion of the image, but it worked well on the examples shown.
