Some months ago I bought a Rapspberry Pi B+ and a Pi noir sensor, with the idea of using it as a small server and take IR pictures.

Once the sensor is attached, is possible to take pictures with the raspistill command

raspistill -o picture.jpg

it has many parameters to regulate exposition, color and image format, but this usage is perfect for most cases.

Since the human eye cannot see within the infrared spectrum (above wavelengths of 750 nm), and consequently computers are not equipped to represent it, the camera has to remap colors to make room for it. The result is that infrared pictures have strange colors, in this case a yellow tone:

Today I tried to implement seam carving in pure Java, without dependencies.

In a few words, it’s a method to automatically reduce the size of an image keeping as much details as possible. How is this accomplished? It’s done by calculating the importance of each pixel with some metric (for example, the gradient magnitude) and removing the less important pixels at first.

The result is made clear by this example from Wikipedia: